Agency, Self-Agency And Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory

The social cognitive theory, proven by Albert Bandura, states that various external factors can influence a person’s social cognition, hence the name of the theory (Bandura, 1986). Furthermore, the social cognitive theory suggests that these external factors can include personal, behavioral, and environmental, or factors that aren’t within a person’s control. However, these external factors do not immediately influence a person’s cognition. There are four essential foundations on which the social cognitive theory stands on: human agency, human capabilities, vicarious learning, and self-efficacy, which all come from different professors and scholars such as Albert Bandura, Martin Hewson, Frank Pajares, and others. These four essential foundations

Human agency can be separated into three parts: individual agency, proxy agency, and collective agency (Hewson, 2002). Firstly, individual agency is when a person acts on their own behalf, thinking about oneself before others. Secondly, proxy agency is when a person acts on the behalf of another, thinking of people other than oneself. Finally, collective agency is when people work together to reach common goals. Additionally, human agency has four core properties: intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness (Bandura, 2006). Intentionality is the making of and the involvement in plans and strategies that people use to determine intentions to act. Forethought is the action of anticipating the results of a person’s actions. Self-reactiveness is when people ponder about and enact the appropriate actions. Lastly, self-reflectiveness is the contemplation of one’s potentials, soundness of their thoughts and actions, and the meaning of their goals. With all the three sub categories and the four properties, human agency is one of the fundamentals that develop human social

The learning of new behaviors that Pajares mentioned could also be interpreted as observing the behaviors of others so that an individual can imitate those specific behaviors, which is also called observational learning. The first step for observational learning is attention, or selective observing. Attention is influenced by the characteristics of the modeled behavior, the model, and the observer. The next step for observational learning is retention, which is influenced by cognitive organization, skill, rehearsal, and symbolic coding. The third step for observational learning is production, interpreting the representation of the observed behavior into action, which is influenced by representational guidance, corrective adjustment, and the observer’s capabilities and related subs skills. The last step in observational learning is motivational process. This process helps humans determine whether observed behaviors are enacted based on the nature of the reinforcement; reinforcements are determinants that can be internal or external and positive or negative (Bandura, 1986, 2001). The final step in observational learning, motivational process, leads to the last and final foundation of the social cognitive theory: self-efficacy. Self-efficacy extends the observational learning by having individuals question the action of