I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less.
– Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince
I am fond of this passage from Machiavelli’s The Prince. It’s a reminder that we are neither wholly able to control our fate, nor our we wholly at the mercy of forces beyond our control. This has been the theme of my last two posts. In Pride v Gratitude, I argued that we should be justifiably proud of the things we accomplish, but that we should be grateful for the start in life that we inherited through luck of birth and no action of our own. In Social inheritance is the gift that keeps on giving, I clarified the nature of our inheritance – that it is not a lump sum granted at birth, but instead comes to us over time as a result of our socio-economic status – people of higher socio-economic status are given more access and opportunities over their lifetime. It’s not true that lower socio-economic status people cannot rise to very high socio-economic status in America. It is true that it is harder to reach high socio-economic status if you start at low socio-economic status. It is dangerous to overemphasize the challenge of starting low and trying to rise. If one does not believe on can work hard and accomplish great things, it is unlikely one will try. America has historically been a place where people emphasized opportunity and potential, rather than the challenge. I was lucky to grow up with the influence of immigrant family members who believed in possibility. When I encountered the Marxist view that one’s birth class (feel free to substitute whatever identity you think is fashionable – race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexual preference, etc.) was determinative of one’s life outcomes, it offended me at the core. It is repugnant that someone can look at my circumstances of birth and make an assertion about my human potential. But part of my own social inheritance is a high sense of self-efficacy. As a teacher, it’s something I try to give to my students. I think it’s something we all have an obligation to encourage in others.
Albert Bandura pioneered the study of self-efficacy in the late ‘70’s. Self-efficacy measures the degree to which you believe you can execute the behaviors necessary to accomplish specific performance outcomes. It’s not necessarily the actual ability or skill to do something, it is the confidence that if you attempt something, you will accomplish it. People with a high degree of self-efficacy will take on more difficult challenges and stick with them in the face of setbacks and failures. People with low self-efficacy will tend to avoid challenges and give up more quickly and generally have lower levels of achievement.
Bandura identified four main sources of self-efficacy:
Mastery experiences – succeeding at a task builds confidence; failure (especially early) can weaken it.
Verbal persuasion – encouragement or coaching from others can strengthen self-belief.
Vicarious experiences – seeing others (especially peers or role models) succeed increases belief that you can too.
Physiological and emotional states – stress, anxiety, or fatigue can undermine efficacy, while positive mood and energy can enhance it.
Each of these sources have some tie to social inheritance. Higher socioeconomic status parents have the capacity to invest a lot in their children will ensure their children experience mastery. They provide them opportunities to get training and to join sports teams and social organizations where they will have a chance to experience success. They will encourage their children and seek out mentors and tutors for them. The children of successful parents will naturally just assume success is natural since they have their parents’ example. Physiological and emotional states such as stress, anxiety, and fatigue are less likely to be experienced if you are higher socioeconomic status. It’s possible to develop higher self-efficacy on your own, but I think much of it comes from social inheritance.
There is a disagreement in the literature about whether self-efficacy is generalized, applying across a broad range of tasks, taking on more of a personality trait, or if it is specific to particular tasks. Bandura himself believed it was specific.
I tend to lean toward the researchers who see it as more trait-like, with generalized confidence. I’ve known many people, especially in the Army, who believed in their general ability to take on almost any problem. It wasn’t arrogance, it was confidence that if a thing could be done, they would have some potential to do it. They would at least give it a try. They also weren’t stupid, and they knew they didn’t have the skill to do anything. So, some of their problem solving was oriented toward finding a team they could work with to solve the problem. They weren’t going to attempt neurosurgery, but they would sure work like heck to find a neurosurgeon if that was the solution. The Army instills self-efficacy through training and culture. I can think of examples of both training and culture that try to reinforce all four of the sources of self-efficacy.
Where self-efficacy is the belief that you can solve a problem, agency is the capacity to actually solve the problem. Without self-efficacy, you will sit passively even when you could act. You can, of course, have too much self-efficacy when you in fact do not have agency. A person whose self-efficacy exceeds his agency is someone who is overconfident and cannot actually effectuate the change they believe they can.
What I like about Machiavelli is he is proposing that we have a high degree of agency to affect the outcomes of our lives. He tells us that Fortune may command half of our lives, but the other half - “perhaps a little less” - is left to us. If you read the chapter this quote is from, he is critiquing people who lack self-efficacy but have agency; people who could take action, but don’t believe their actions would matter. That is not a way to live a worthy life. Bandura shows us that self-efficacy is the bridge between what Fortune allots and what agency can accomplish. If we believe we can act, we are more likely to act; and if we act, we sometimes succeed, even against long odds. Much of what we inherit—socially, economically, emotionally—tilts the scales toward greater or lesser confidence, but each of us has a duty to cultivate self-efficacy in ourselves and encourage it in others. To do otherwise is to waste the gifts of circumstance and diminish our agency. A worthy life, then, lies in recognizing both the limits and the possibilities: accepting what Fortune denies us, but building competence, contribution, and connection wherever we can. In doing so, we make ourselves fit for society and strive toward meaning - not by waiting passively for outcomes, but by acting as though our actions matter, because they do.