In this video I discuss self-efficacy, internal vs. external locus of control, and self-perception theory. I consider how these theories relate to the process of personality transformation and personal change.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to look at a few more theories related to the self and we’ll start with the idea of self-efficacy and this also comes from Albert Bandura who I talked about in the previous video when I talked about reciprocal determinism. Now the idea of self-efficacy is that it’s not enough to know what we want and even to know how to get it, we also have to have a belief that we’re capable of doing what’s necessary in order to reach that goal.

And this is referred to as an “efficacy expectancy” or a feeling of “self-efficacy“. We believe that we’re capable of doing what needs to be done in order to reach a particular goal. It’s a feeling of competence that we might have for some particular behavior. We think “I can actually do the thing that needs to be done”. Now, we might think that there’s certain behaviors that we feel we’re incapable of doing and you probably have some of these yourself or you’ve probably heard other people mention things that they say “I just can’t do that”.

So this brings us to the idea that if we feel incapable of certain behaviors that’s going to influence the environments that we seek out and it’s also going to influence how we interpret the consequences that occur from a certain behavior. So we might imagine somebody who says “well, I just can’t talk to people. I don’t know, I can’t talk to a group of strangers”. You know, “the worst thing I can imagine is being in a room with a bunch of people and I don’t know anyone, right? I just can’t talk to anyone in that situation. I can’t do it”, right and so they’re naturally going to try to avoid that environment. And they’re also, if they’re put in that environment, they might interpret it very negatively. I think they might say “Ok, I was here and I just couldn’t talk to anyone and it was a total disaster”, right? “I felt horrible, nobody talked to me, it was, you know, the worst thing I could imagine.”

Well, we might think about how we could change that. How we could change this feeling of self-efficacy? And this goes back to the idea I talked about in the previous video of reciprocal determinism. So I gave the example where this small existing difference in predisposition sort of snowballed and led to a large difference in these two boys, right? One who’s slightly introverted and that influences the environments, that influences the interpretation and the behavior, and then we get sort of even more introverted behavior and the one who was slightly extroverted who meets people, that influences environments that he seeks out, that influences interpretation of consequences and sort of grew in that direction.

But we shouldn’t think of it as deterministic in just one direction here. The idea is that if we intervene in any of these places we can start a change in a new direction. We can have a transformation of some aspect of personality. So let’s imagine somebody who has the feeling that they’re incapable of talking to people in a room where they don’t know anyone. They’re at the networking event, let’s say and they say “I just can’t talk to a group of strangers”. We might say, well could you talk to one person that you don’t know? You know, maybe I’m, maybe I’m capable of that. I guess, I guess I could introduce myself to one person, you know, that might be something I can do. Well, that might change how they interpret the consequences. So now instead of saying “well, it was total disaster. I didn’t talk to anybody.” To “well, I talked to one person and that’s progress” you know? “And, and I didn’t die” and then maybe they said “Ok, well maybe I could do that again. Maybe I could put myself in an environment where I don’t know anyone, but I can talk to one person and that will be an improvement”. And then say “ok, you know, it actually went fairly well. You know, I think I knew how to introduce myself. I talked to this person, they told me something interesting, and then they introduced me to another person and now I met two people.”

And it’s like well, that’s that’s a huge change from zero and then next time maybe it’s three or four people. And now they’re seeking out this environment more often, right? They’re more comfortable putting themselves in this situation and so over time we have this transformation in their personality based on this change in their self-efficacy. They changed their interpretation to “I can do some of this. I can do the first step. I can do the next step.” Then from there it gradually has grown.

Now, another way we can think about the self is in terms of how we interpret things. This is the idea of a locus of control and this comes from Julian Rotter. And the basic idea here is that there’s two ways we can interpret the consequences; we can see them as being caused by ourselves or we can see them as being caused by external things. So this is an internal locus of control or an external locus of control. So do you see the self as being the cause of something that has happened, or other people or the environment or some notion of fate? And this can be summarized I think fairly well with two simple sentences; of believing that I make things happen or things happen to me.

We might see this if we think about two students who have just gotten a test score back and they’ve both done fairly poorly. So one student might say “I’m responsible. This is my fault. I didn’t study enough, you know? I knew I needed to review this vocabulary and I didn’t do it, and that’s why I got the low score, because of something I did”.

The other student, and you might be guilty of this yourself, or you’ve almost certainly seen other students do this, might adopt an external locus of control. They get the low score back and they say “Mr. Corayer hates me, you know, it’s his fault. I can’t believe he gave me such a low score, right?” Or they might blame some concept of fate they say “you know this always happens to me, you know, no matter how much I study I always get a low score”. Rather than saying well, maybe it’s how they’re studying that needs to be changed. “Oh, it’s fate, I’m sort of predestined to always get low scores in my math class” or something.

Alright, now in this example you might see where it’s probably a better idea to adopt an internal locus of control because that gives you a sense of responsibility and a sense of control for future behaviors. “Ok, well if I didn’t study enough this time. Now I know. Next time I need to study more, or I didn’t, I should have made flashcards for the vocabulary. Or I should have asked a question in class because that question showed up on the test and I didn’t really understand and I had the opportunity to, you know, get the answer before the test and I didn’t take it.” Whereas having an external locus of control, if you believe that your score on the test is outside of your own hands, well then there’s not much motivation to change your behavior. “Well, if I always get a low score, what’s the point of studying? I’ll just get a low score again next time.”

But we’ll see in some future videos some situations where having an internal locus of control is not necessarily a good thing. So when we think about things that are terrible things that happen to people that they’re not really responsible, for it’s not necessarily helpful for them to believe they’re responsible. So you get diagnosed with some terrible illness and it really is not anything you did. You get some type of cancer, it’s not necessarily helpful for you to believe “I brought this upon myself” but we’ll talk about that in a future unit.

The next thing I want to talk about related to the self, and this also relates to some of the ideas from self efficacy and reciprocal determinism, is the idea of self perception and this comes from Daryl Bem. The idea here is that we don’t just act out our own behaviors, we observe ourselves acting out behaviors, right? We’re observers of our own behavior. And so you might have a tendency to think that, you know, “I think things and that causes my behavior”, right? So that “I have thoughts and those thoughts, I then act out in the world” in terms of behavior.

But, that’s true a lot of a time, but it’s not the only way that things can work because it can also be the case that your behaviors are going to influence how you think about yourself. So let’s imagine that you’re a shy person so you think of yourself as being shy, you might say “well I think of myself as shy and that means that I act in this withdrawn manner when I interact with people” and we might think well maybe you could put yourself in a situation where you have to interact with somebody and you might say “well now I’m doing the thing”.

So let’s say you’re a man who’s fairly withdrawn and shy around women and you find it really difficult to talk to them but we create a situation where you have to talk to a woman for five minutes. There’s an attractive woman and you’re being forced to talk to her for a few minutes and now suddenly we have this change in your behavior. You’re observing yourself doing the thing that maybe you didn’t think you could do and you say “well, look at me I’m doing X. Maybe it’s not going perfectly but I’m doing it, you know, it’s, it’s not terrible. I’m not dying, she’s not dying, you know I’m talking to this attractive woman. I didn’t even think I could do this but look at me. I’m doing it”. And that can lead to a change in the thoughts about the self.

Now the person is thinking “well I must be, you know, better at this than I thought.” Or “I must not be as shy as I thought. I must be more capable than I thought”, right? We get changes in the thoughts about the self and then those changes can lead to changes in future behavior. Or now when there’s an opportunity to talk to an attractive woman the guy thinks “well, you know I’ve done this before and maybe I can even do a better job this time”, right? And this can also be that kind of transformation that I talked about for the idea of self-efficacy.

Alright now the last thing I’d like to mention is the idea of self esteem. Now of all these ideas that I’ve talked about, this is the one you’ve probably heard of. You probably haven’t heard much talk about locus of control or self-perception theory or self-efficacy before but you’ve almost certainly heard of the idea of self esteem. So what self esteem refers to is a positive or negative evaluation of the self and I think the reason you’ve probably heard of it is there’s been a great deal of emphasis on the concept of self esteem as being important, right? And when I was younger, you know, there was a great deal of emphasis on praising children, right? Making them feel good about themselves, giving them positive, you know, feelings and high self esteem.

But it doesn’t seem to be really all that important in terms of influencing behavior. It’s not the case that if you just have high self esteem all your problems will disappear and you’ll be able to do everything, right? And so I think there’s been too much emphasis on this idea of self esteem rather than a more necessary emphasis which would be on the ideas of self efficacy, locus of control, self perception theory, and feeling that people can take control of their own behavior. That they can create transformations rather than they just need to feel good about themselves and things will work out. Ok, so those are the last few theories that we’ll look at related to the self. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!