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Central to the social cognitive theory is the concept of self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy refers to the level of a person's confidence in his/ her ability
to successfully perform a behavior. It is the idea that people decide how
to behave based more on their belief in their own capabilities of
accomplishment rather than in their knowledge and skills (Pajares as cited by
Ananda, 2006). Having mentioned that a person’s capacity is
different from their actual knowledge and skills, we can infer that a person
who is much knowledgeable and skillful might have low self-efficacy, and a
person who lacks knowledge and is less skillful might have high self-efficacy.
Therefore, self-efficacy cannot be used as the lone determinant whether or not
a person can achieve future successes, because there are other determinants of
success to consider. Nevertheless, having varied levels of self-efficacy
among individuals can help explain why two individuals with very similar skills
and knowledge can end up exhibiting extremely different behaviors (Ananda,
2006).
