Soc Sci 1 - Bandura

Human Agency

The capability of individuals to intentionally exert control over their own functioning and environmental events through their actions.

Agentic Perspective

The theoretical stance that views people as self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting, and self-regulating entities rather than passive products of environmental inputs or internal drives.

Triadic Reciprocal Causation

Bandura’s causal model in which personal factors (cognitive, affective, and biological events), behavioral patterns, and environmental influences operate as interacting determinants that influence one another bidirectionally.

Personal Factors (Triadic Reciprocal Causation)

Internal cognitive, affective, biological, and perceptual events that shape and are shaped by behavior and external environments.

Behavioral Factors (Triadic Reciprocal Causation)

The actions, choices, and executed performances that dynamically interact with personal thoughts and environmental conditions.

Environmental Factors (Triadic Reciprocal Causation)

External physical and social conditions that influence personal states and behavior while also being modified by human action.

Imposed Environment

The physical and social environment thrust upon individuals, which they must experience regardless of their choice, requiring adaptive response.

Selected Environment

The portion of the potential environment that individuals choose to enter and experience based on their interests, values, and competencies.

Constructed Environment

The environment that individuals create or transform through their own agentic activities and social innovations.

Core Features of Human Agency

The key properties that define human agency: intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness.

Intentionality

A core feature of agency involving the cognitive representation of a future course of action and a proactive commitment to bring it about.

Proximal Intentions

Present-directed action plans that guide and maintain immediate effort toward executing broader goals.

Shared Intention

A collective commitment and coordination of plans among multiple participants engaged in joint activity.

Forethought

A core feature of agency in which individuals set goals, anticipate outcome consequences, and visualize future scenarios to motivate and guide present actions.

Anticipatory Self-Guidance

The process by which projected future outcomes and goals are converted into present motivators and behavioral regulators.

Outcome Expectations

Cognitive representations of the likely physical, social, or self-evaluative consequences that specific actions will produce.

Self-Reactiveness

A core feature of agency that links thought to action through self-regulatory processes, self-monitoring, and self-evaluative motivators.

Self-Regulation

The multi-component process of monitoring behavior, evaluating it against personal standards, and adjusting actions through self-reactive incentives.

Self-Monitoring

The initial subfunction of self-regulation involving continuous observation of one's own behavioral patterns and surrounding conditions.

Personal Standards

Internally adopted criteria used to evaluate performance, guide conduct, and trigger self-reactive consequences like pride or self-censure.

Proximal Subgoals

Short-term performance targets that provide immediate direction, feedback, and self-incentives to sustain effort toward distant aspirations.

Self-Reflectiveness

A core feature of agency consisting of metacognitive self-examination where individuals evaluate their own thoughts, capabilities, and life pursuits.

Metacognition

The higher-level cognitive capacity to reflect upon one's own thinking processes, evaluate correctness, and adjust action strategies.

Direct Personal Agency

Individual exercise of control where a person directly exerts influence over their own mind, motivation, and actions.

Proxy Agency

A socially mediated mode of agency in which individuals get others who possess expertise, power, or resources to act at their behest to secure desired outcomes.

Onerous Aspect of Personal Control

The heavy strain, time demand, risk, and responsibility associated with maintaining personal control, which often leads individuals to resort to proxy agency.

Collective Agency

Agency exercised through the shared belief, pooled knowledge, skills, and coordinated transactional efforts of group members acting conjointly.

Perceived Self-Efficacy

People's beliefs in their capability to organize and execute courses of action required to produce given levels of performance.

Efficacy Beliefs

The foundational self-perceptions that determine how people feel, think, motivate themselves, persevere through adversity, and behave.

Perceived Collective Efficacy

A group's shared belief in its joint capability to organize and execute actions necessary to achieve common goals; an emergent group-level property.

Biological Potentialism

The view that human biology provides flexible potential capacities and constraints, while experiential, environmental, and agentic factors shape actual development and cultural variation.

Biological Determinism

The rejected view that human behavior and social structures are strictly governed and dictated by evolved genetic or neurobiological programming.

Fortuitous Events

Unplanned and unexpected environmental occurrences that intersect with an individual's life course to create new trajectories.

Chance Encounters

An unintended meeting of previously unfamiliar individuals that initiates a sequence of events shaping personal or professional paths.

Agentic Management of Fortuity

The proactive cultivation of competencies, interests, and active lifestyles to maximize beneficial chance encounters and capitalize on unexpected opportunities.

Underminers of Collective Efficacy

Social, technological, and institutional factors in modern societies that erode people's belief in their shared power to accomplish social change.

Transnational Interdependence (Underminer)

An underminer where remote global market forces and international systems impact local life, making problems feel beyond local or national control.

Complex Technologies (Underminer)

An underminer where everyday life is governed by intricate technical systems that ordinary citizens neither comprehend nor feel able to influence.

Institutional Inertia (Underminer)

An underminer where entrenched administrative bureaucracies and vested interest groups delay or impede meaningful social progress.

Militant Factionalism (Underminer)

An underminer where social fragmentation into narrow, competing interest groups leads to political gridlock and mutual immobilization.

Magnitude of Human Problems (Underminer)

An underminer where global problems (e.g., population growth, environmental crises) appear so massive that individual and local group efforts feel powerless to address them.