Plans, Confidence, and Performance: An Elaboration of Self-Efficacy Theory

摘要

Self-efficacy theory states that performance is best predicted by carefully assessing an individual's self-efficacy expectations. Self-efficacy expectations are the output of a central processor of relevant information. This paper reports the results of two studies which evaluated the possibility of a person's plans for performing a specific behavior having a direct, unmediated effect on performance. One study used dominating a ten minute conversation as the experimental task. For this study, 70 male and 82 female undergraduate students were the subjects. These subjects wrote out plans for dominating a conversation, indicated their satisfaction with their plans, and recorded their self-efficacy expectations for actually dominating the conversation. The subjects for the other study were 107 students in a school for training court reporters. They wrote out plans for taking down and transcribing question and answer testimony. Results of additional analyses suggest that the quality of a person's plan for performance may be helpful in explaining discrepancies between expected and actual performance.