Traditional psychological perspectives focus on individual vulnerabilities and one-on-one therapeutic interventions, but research from the field of positive psychology offer insights to people's capacity to face less-than-optimal life circumstances.
Despite economic inequities, astounding numbers of people worldwide report high levels of happiness (Helliwell, Layard, & Sachs, 2019).
Albert Bandura is a leading researcher contributing to the foundations of positive psychology. Bandura’s social cognitive theory (SCT) gives framework, provides guidance for future research, and offers pathways going forward.
At the heart of SCT is self-efficacy - the belief that one can take actions that will produce the desired outcomes. Indeed, hope and optimism are our everyday terms for agency. Expanding, as Bandura did in the last chapter of Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (1997), individual agency is the beginning, but it is through shared efforts and collective efficacy that greater success can and must be achieved.
In this chapter, I bring Bandura's research to our international community highlighting the power of self and the collective efficacy to address looming global challenges.
How you can build your own sense of purpose, efficacy, and power to enact beneficial changes, as Bandura role-models and promises, is shared here.
In his last decade, Bandura focused on enlisting the power of youth to address climate change and the many related social issues. From gestation forward, we are social beings dependent upon one another. Building a child’s efficacy, caring, empathy, and emotion regulation toward social competence for success, as Bandura recommended, Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory provides context for our mutual interdependence.
Drawing upon the fundamental power of role models (positive, negative, and transitioning) and storytelling, Bandura’s work with Miguel Sabido (Televisia, The Population Communications International – PCI , Population Media Center (PCM), Lynne Cherry (Young Voices for the Planet), and others, shows how very successful serial drama programs – story telling for the greater global good – can be vehicles to empower change. Notably, hope, self-efficacy and collective efficacy are necessarily united and cannot be disambiguated.
Hope, Bandura explains, is an individual’s as well as the shared energy needed to take action. “People can ill afford to trade efficacious endeavors for public apathy or mutual immobilization. The times call for social initiative that build people's sense of collective efficacy to influence the conditions that shape their lives and those of future generations" (Bandura, 1997, p. 525.). Bandura’s eight mechanisms of Moral Disengagement: How People Can Do Harm and Live with Themselves (2016) shared in his last book are included here. How easily we might slip into inaction and apathy must be understood to ensure our moral engagement.
What do you see that needs to be done to achieve our shared humanitarian goals? Interestingly, the simple process of recognizing a need, setting goals (proximal, distal), and taking action lifts one out of hopelessness. Joining with others not only provides life sustaining social connections and meaning, it yields authentic self-esteem and collective action efficacy.
Social cognitive theory and positive psychology gives the roadmap forward and Bandura’s call to action is clear. Now is the time to act, efficaciously beyond the self - together - to create our planet's equitable sustainable future.