In order to be confident that we're acting with agency, we must understand what the concept of agency really means, to consider how we might judge the quality of agency we possess, and to learn what scientific research has discovered about this aspect of our personality.
With these intentions, there's no better place to begin than with the work of Albert Bandura, the eminent psychologist who pioneered research in self-efficacy and placed agency as the centerpiece within his broader Social Cognitive Theory.
In his final publication, finished with the help of his often cited colleague, Daniel Cervone, after his passing, Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective on Human Nature distills a lifetime of research into a compact, dense, yet approachable package so that we may learn and act on the core findings Bandura wished to share with the world.
In this review, my aim is to outline and reflect on the fundamental concepts presented in this book and consider their influence with how we take on the tasks of our lives.
What Do We Mean By "Agency"?
Let's begin by considering the concept of agency itself.
Agency supposes that we act in the world, not simply as a function of forces outside of our control, but as conscious, deliberate human beings.
Without falling into the perennial "free will" debate, we can safely say that people are endowed with the ability to think, reflect, and decide on the actions they take.
According to Bandura, to act as an agent is to be able, through deliberate and reflective conscious activity, to intentionally influence one's functioning and circumstances.
And in order for our actions to be "agentic", they require four psychological functions: intention, forethought, self-reaction, and self-reflection.
These four functions serve as inputs that allow us to observe and evaluate our level of agency in any scenario. Here are some questions that come to mind:
- What is the quality of our intention? Is it clear, true, and meaningful?
- How much forethought inhabits the options we're considering?
- How well can we observe ourselves and self-regulate while deciding or acting?
- Do we reflect, from a neutral perspective, and integrate what we learn?
But are these questions enough to know if we have "high agency"?
Naval Ravikant famously says “the only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life” (and are smart enough to know what to want).
The same can be said about agency. Do you know what you want and are you able to get it? (Are you intentional, thoughtful, self-regulated, and self-reflective?)
Bandura goes further and defines "freedom" itself as the exercise of self-influence in the service of selected goals and desired futures.
How to Hack Your Reality
Bandura models reality in three broad spheres, each influencing the others bidirectionally: our intrapersonal space, our behavior, and our environment.
Our intrapersonal space is everything happening within our minds. Thoughts, memories, beliefs, emotions, our focus and concentration, etc.
Our environment is everything accessible, within reach, to our actions. This includes our social and digital environments.
Our behavior are the things we do that impact our environment or intrapersonal space. All our daily habits, personal projects, and the like.
What is the influence of each on the others? Here's a few inspiring questions...
- How much of what's happening in our mind affects our behaviors? How much does our headspace affect our relationship to the environment?
- How does our behavior impact our mindset? How do we shape our physical and social spaces intentionally or otherwise?
- How does our environment contribute to our state of mind? How are our behaviors supported or limited by our surroundings?
And because these aspects of reality are causal in both ways means there exists many creative combinations that allow us get what we want, or at least create the best shot at it.
Sometimes a change of scenery creates a fresh perspective on a problem that inspires new undertakings.
Shifting our everyday behaviors to promote our physical health can impact both our body and our mind.
And most importantly, according to Bandura's research, improving the belief in our ability to make change has a direct effect on what actions we take and how we approach them.
The Power of Self-Belief
We've all heard it or some version of it before: "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right."
As corny as it might sound, there's significant scientific grounding to the idea that self-belief is the driving factor of achievement.
Within the causal interplay of environment, behavior, and intrapersonal space Bandura writes:
“No psychological mechanism is more central or pervasive than people's beliefs about their capabilities to exercise control over events that affect their lives.”
Labeled self-efficacy beliefs, these are “judgements of (our) capabilities to execute courses of action that are required to attain designated types of performances.”
And according to meta-analyses of the research, it is consistently shown that self-efficacy beliefs contribute significantly to motivation and performance.
Self-efficacy impacts four important psychological processes:
- Selection Processes: people choose activities and environments that they believe they can succeed in and avoid those they believe they can't.
- Cognitive Processes: people will use more of their mental faculties to problem-solve, plan, and visualize achievement if they are confident in their abilities.
- Motivational Processes: people have more resilience and a more positive outlook on the inevitable setbacks that happen in any endeavor if they possess positive self-efficacy beliefs.
- Affective Processes: people with strong self-efficacy beliefs can more easily regulate their emotions and are less sensitive to threatening or taxing scenarios.
Thankfully, our self-efficacy beliefs are not static and, according to Bandura, we can influence them in four ways:
- Performance Accomplishments: generally, having past successes is the best indicator that we can achieve something in the future.
- Vicarious Experience: seeing others, especially those similar to us, demonstrate that something is possible, can impact the beliefs about our own abilities.
- Verbal Persuasion: receiving encouragement from those in our social spheres and from our "higher self" can inspire us to take on bigger challenges.
- Emotional & Somatic State: attuning to and regulating our moods, emotions, and bodily sensations to generate or integrate the somatic effects of positive self-efficacy beliefs.
One thing we haven't focused on yet is any particular goal in itself. What we decide to take on impacts our relationship to it. Always taking the easy route? No sweat. Adventuring on the steeper path? Might be a challenge.
The Goals We Give Ourselves
What feels like common knowledge gets scientifically verified by Bandura as we narrow in on how our goals themselves impact our ability to accomplish them.
The factors that impact our relationship to our goals, whether we feel motivated or discouraged, include goal specificity, goal challenge level, and goal proximity.
We can use these factors to shape our goals or break them down into subgoals that add up to a larger goal.
In Bandura's words: "self‐motivation is best sustained through a series of proximal subgoals that are hierarchically organized to ensure successive advances to superordinate goals."
- Goal Specificity: the clearer we can articulate the specifics of our goal, the easier it will be to estimate the amount of skill or effort required and therefore how we assess the workload.
- Goal Challenge Level: evidence shows that striving toward a goal that stretches our capacity or capabilities bring out our best performances. But also that failure to reach unrealistic goals will eventually affect our self-efficacy beliefs.
- Goal Proximity: "someday" goals will never be achieved if we never prioritize them in the present. We tend to focus on what we can accomplish sooner rather than later.
And it's through proactive self management that we decide which goals to take on when and how we do so. Bandura continues his research, this time shifting to our intrapersonal self-regulating processes as part of our goal striving.
While we're in the flow of our day to day life, or the flow of deep work, in the back of our mind we could always reflect in these three ways:
- Affective self-evaluation: "What's going on inside my head, heart, and gut right now? Is this the right thing for me? Or am I misaligned?"
- Perceived self-efficacy in goal attainment: "Am I accomplishing what I set out to do? Or am I making progress? Do I believe that I can do it?"
- Ongoing adjustments in personal aims: "What should I do next? Do I need to break this down into smaller tasks? Or try it another way?"
And the environment is providing feedback in structured and unstructured ways according to the goals we've selected and according to any tracking or monitoring tools that were implemented.
Ultimately, according to Bandura, "the common factors found to be conductive to enduring motivation include adopting personal challenges in accordance with one's perceived capabilities and having informative feedback of progress."
Learning and Modeling Behavior
The question that leads all the way back to the beginning of Bandura's research is "how do we learn to do the things we want to achieve?"
Or as Bandura puts it "how do we learn the skills to become effective agents?"
This is where the "Social" in Social Cognitive Theory makes its appearance.
Famously introduced to the world in the Bobo Doll Experiments, Bandura showed how our actions are learned from our social environment. Either directly or indirectly we learn a majority of our behaviors from others.
But because our social connections can't literally reach into our mind in order to reproduce what they're modeling for us, this observational learning requires our own cognition and therefore our agency.
When analyzing this phenomenon, Bandura identified four elements that reproduced socially learned behaviors.
- Attention: Simply put, you can't learn what you don't attend to. The quantity and quality of our attention on what we're observing dictates how much we take in.
- Retention: After placing our attention on the desired learned behavior, we have to hold onto what we've learned. So we store this information in verbal representation and/or as mental imagery that serve as guides for subsequent reproduction.
- Production: Using the stored information to guide our efforts we compare our current version with what we recall and make ongoing adjustments. Highly complex behavior requires learning and combining elementary skills.
- Motivation: Whether we reproduce certain behaviors depends on the social environment we're in. If we anticipate judgement from others we're more likely to not engage in certain behaviors.
Our individual habits, patterns, quirks, and overall personality is shaped from choosing certain influences over others and generating new and novel combinations of them.
Bandura observed that this socially influenced behavior not only impacts what we do but also how we feel about things. If we model other's emotional reactions to the world around them, we'll embody the same sentiment in similar circumstances.
“Observers can acquire long-lasting attitudes and emotional reactions towards persons, places, or things that they have not encountered themselves, but for which they have observed model's emotional responses.”
Putting it All Together
Bandura's high-level observations about how we act in the world can be integrated in order to generate some useful practices.
Firstly, it's clear that it's essential to consciously develop positive self-efficacy beliefs so that we can accomplish the meaningful goals of our life:
- Do what you set out to do. Become a finisher. Stack personal victories, no matter how small. Get the ball rolling.
- Surround yourself, in whatever way you can, with those that are doing what you want to do. Let them inspire you rather than discourage you.
- Develop self-talk that encourages you to take dedicated action on your goals. Work with professionals or peers that will support you in your endeavors.
- Learn to skillfully recruit your moods, emotions, and somatic experience to achieve your aims. Notice how your beliefs and your body are connected.
Next, reflecting on the fundamental elements that make up our agency, and how we might adjust our efforts, can ensure we're maximizing our human potential in pursuit of our aims:
- Make your intentions, your ultimate objectives, clear and meaningful. Discover any internal dissonance and consider what to do with it. Seek resonance.
- Create time and space for deep thinking. Consider many options and their pros and cons. Meditate on the implications of each option and their consequences.
- Stay present and mindful when engaged with the work related to your goals. Observe your reactions to difficulties. Call on your self-confidence to surmount obstacles.
- Regularly reflect on the direction you're heading. What are you completing? How does the work feel? What can you learn? How does this change things?
Finally, we can use the research around goal setting and learning to ensure we take on the right goals and approach them in the right way.
- Make timely, specific, stretch goals to maximize motivation and performance.
- Learn what you need to by modeling from the best sources and make notes so you can reproduce it to the right standard.
My Personal Practices for Agency
On a practical level, I want to share the few things I've implemented as a result of reading Bandura's work.
First is that I dedicate a period of time in my morning to plan the day and develop or refine plans for other projects. During that time I visualize how I want the day or the project to go, then get clear on what success looks like.
Part of planning my day is organizing all my tasks into my daily notebook by listing out what I want to do and in what general order. Then I make a note of the times when I start and stop the most important tasks, habits, or practices, so I can know exactly how much time and effort I'm dedicating to them.
Monitoring my day in my notebook allows me observations that I can react to in the present and learn from in the future. And as I'm reacting to the happenings of the day I can remind myself that the belief in my abilities and my determination is the most important aspect of accomplishing what I set out to do. And those details contained in prior days notes presents a history of past wins and momentum.
Want to develop your own practices to enhance your sense of agency in your life? Please reach out to schedule your free introductory call.
