One Cannot Afford To Be A Realist.

Moreover, Joint Occurrences Tend To Be Better Recalled Than Instances When The Effect Does Not Occur. The Proneness To Remember Confirming Instances, But To Overlook Disconfirming Ones, Further Serves To Convert, In Thought, Coincidences Into Causalities.

If You Look At Our Theories Of Social Pathology And Then At The Dismal Conditions In Which Children Grow Up In Our Ghettos, You Would Predict That All Of Them Would Be On Drugs Or Psychological Basket Cases. Yet If You Use Criteria Like Gainful Employment, Forming Partnerships And Life Without Crime, You Will Find That Most Of Those Kids Make It.

People's Conceptions About Themselves And The Nature Of Things Are Developed And Verified Through Four Different Processes: Direct Experience Of The Effects Produced By Their Actions, Vicarious Experience Of The Effects Produced By Somebody Else's Actions, Judgments Voiced By Others, And Derivation Of Further Knowledge From What They Already Know By Using Rules Of Inference

Among The Types Of Thoughts That Affect Action, None Is More Central Or Pervasive Than People's Judgments Of Their Capabilities To Deal Effectively With Different Realities

Self-appraisals Of Efficacy Are Reasonably Accurate, But They Diverge From Action Because People Do Not Know Fully What They Will Have To Do, Lack Information For Regulating Their Effort, Or Are Hindered By External Factors From Doing What They Can