Barry R. Sherman

Although knowledge has an important influence on behavior, knowledge alone
cannot explain the full range of human actions. People often act in ways that are
not in their own best interests, especially in the area of personal health. Individuals
smoke cigarettes and drink excessive amounts of alcohol even though they are fully
aware of the dangers. Overweight individuals do not restrict their diets despite
medical warnings regarding the perils of obesity. People make little effort to alter
their hurried lifestyles in the face of evidence suggesting the harmful effects of
stress.

Such actions suggest that additional variables must be included in any model
that seeks to explain behavior ( Schunk & Carbonari, 1984). Specifically, we must
take into account the notion that self-referent thoughts, or those thoughts a person
has about herself, operate importantly in the relationship between knowledge and
action. One phenomenon that is central to self-referent thinking is an individual's
perception of self-efficacy ( Bandura, 1977a, 1981) or the sense that I can do
( Schunk & Carbonari, 1984).

Although self-efficacy was briefly defined in Chapter 3, it bears repeating here.
Self-efficacy is specifically defined as the belief in one's ability to perform a task
or execute a specified behavior successfully ( Bandura, 1977a). The term refers to
people's beliefs regarding their capabilities to exercise control over events that
affect their lives. To have self-efficacy implies that a person believes she has the
necessary capability to mobilize the motivation, cognitive resources, and courses
of action needed to exercise control over task demands ( Bandura, 1989). Self-effi-
cacy judgments are concerned not with the skills one has, but with judgments of
what one can do with the skills one possesses ( Bandura, 1986a).

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