Evidence for Building on positive experiences #

Every substantive claim on the Building on positive experiences page is checked against current research. Here is each claim, how well today’s evidence supports it, and the sources. The full, de-duplicated source list lives on the references page.

Supported · strong evidence — Self-efficacy — the belief that you can handle a task — predicts whether you will attempt it, persist when it is difficult, and recover from setbacks.

Bandura’s self-efficacy theory is among the most replicated constructs in psychology; meta-analyses across academic, work, and health domains confirm self-efficacy predicts effort, persistence, and performance.

Sources: Bandura, A. (1997), Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control · Stajkovic, A. D. & Luthans, F. (1998), Self-efficacy and work-related performance: A meta-analysis, Psychological Bulletin · full reference ›

Supported · strong evidence — Mastery experiences — having actually performed a difficult task successfully before — are the most powerful source of self-efficacy.

Bandura identifies enactive mastery experience as the most influential of the four sources of efficacy; this ordering is consistently supported in subsequent reviews of efficacy-source research.

Sources: Bandura, A. (1997), Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control · Usher, E. L. & Pajares, F. (2008), Sources of self-efficacy in school: Critical review of the literature and future directions, Review of Educational Research · full reference ›

Supported · moderate evidence — Recalling a past success that closely resembles the upcoming challenge is more effective for building confidence than recalling an unrelated success.

Self-efficacy is theorised and generally found to be task- and domain-specific, so success on a similar task transfers more efficacy than a dissimilar one; direct experiments isolating recall-similarity are fewer than the broad specificity literature.

Sources: Bandura, A. (1997), Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control · Usher, E. L. & Pajares, F. (2008), Sources of self-efficacy in school, Review of Educational Research · full reference ›

Supported · moderate evidence — Successes attributed to one’s own effort and persistence raise self-efficacy more than successes attributed to luck or easy conditions.

Bandura’s account holds that the efficacy impact of an outcome depends on its causal attribution; effort/ability attributions for success strengthen efficacy, consistent with attribution research, though effect sizes vary.

Sources: Bandura, A. (1997), Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control · Weiner, B. (1985), An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion, Psychological Review · full reference ›

Supported · moderate evidence — Vividly imagining yourself coping with and succeeding at an upcoming challenge (mental rehearsal) can strengthen the belief that you can do it.

Bandura lists imaginal/cognitive enactment as a contributor to efficacy, and mental-imagery rehearsal shows reliable (if modest) benefits on confidence and performance in sport and skill-learning meta-analyses.

Sources: Bandura, A. (1997), Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control · Driskell, J. E., Copper, C. & Moran, A. (1994), Does mental practice enhance performance? A meta-analysis, Journal of Applied Psychology · full reference ›

Supported · moderate evidence — Seeing a similar other person succeed (a vicarious experience) raises your own self-efficacy, but less strongly than your own direct success.

Vicarious experience via similar models is an established secondary source of efficacy in Bandura’s framework and in modelling studies; its effect is generally weaker and more variable than enactive mastery.

Sources: Bandura, A. (1997), Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control · Usher, E. L. & Pajares, F. (2008), Sources of self-efficacy in school, Review of Educational Research · full reference ›

Supported · moderate evidence — Neurolinguistic programming (NLP) techniques such as anchoring lack robust evidence of effectiveness, so the de-branded mechanism (recalling and imagining successes) should be used instead of the NLP claim.

A systematic review by Sturt and colleagues found little evidence supporting NLP’s effectiveness for health-related outcomes; broader reviews likewise find NLP’s specific techniques unsupported, while the underlying confidence mechanism is better explained by self-efficacy theory.

Sources: Sturt, J. et al. (2012), Neurolinguistic programming: a systematic review of the effects on health outcomes, British Journal of General Practice — https://bjgp.org/content/62/604/e757 · Witkowski, T. (2010), Thirty-five years of research on neuro-linguistic programming, Polish Psychological Bulletin · full reference ›