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124 BANDURA

challenges are met. In many areas of social and moral behavior the inter-
nal standards that serve as the basis for regulating one’s conduct have
greater stability. People do not change from week to week what they
regard as right or wrong or good or bad. After they adopt a standard of
morality, their self-sanctions for actions that match or violate their per-
sonal standards serve as the regulatory influencers (Bandura, 1991b). The
exercise of moral agency has dual aspects—inhibitive and proactive. The
inhibitive form is manifested in the power to refrain from behaving inhu-
manely. The proactive form of morality is expressed in the power to behave
humanely (Bandura, 1999b).
The capability of forethought adds another dimension to the temporal
extension of personal agency. Most human behavior is directed by fore-
thought toward events and outcomes projected into the future. The future
time perspective manifests itself in many different ways. People set goals
for themselves, anticipate the likely consequences of their prospective
actions, and otherwise plan courses of action that are likely to produce
desired outcomes and to avoid undesired ones. Because future events
have no actual existence, they cannot be causes of current motivation and
action. However, by being represented cognitively in the present, con-
ceived futures can operate anticipatorily as motivators and regulators of
current behavior. When projected over a long time course on matters of
value, a forethoughtful perspective provides direction, coherence, and
meaning to one’s life.

SELF-REFLECTIVE CAPABILITY

The capability to reflect on oneself and the adequacy of one’s thoughts
and actions is another distinctly human attribute that figures prominently
in social cognitive theory. People are not only agents of action but self-
examiners of their functioning. Effective cognitive functioning requires
reliable ways of distinguishing between accurate and faulty thinking. In
verifying thought by self-reflective means, people generate ideas, act on
them, or predict occurrences from them. They then judge from the results
the adequacy of their thoughts and change them accordingly. The validity
and functional value of one’s thoughts are evaluated by comparing how
well thoughts match some indicant of reality. Four different modes of
thought verification can be distinguished. They include enactive, vicari-
ous, social, and logical forms.
Enactive verification relies on the adequacy of the fit between one’s
thoughts and the results of the actions they spawn. Good matches corrob-
orate thoughts; mismatches tend to refute them. In vicarious verification,
observing other people’s transactions with the environment and the
effects they produce provides a check on the correctness of one’s own