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6. SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION 125

thinking. Vicarious thought verification is not simply a supplement to
enactive experience. Symbolic modeling greatly expands the range of ver-
ification experiences that cannot otherwise be attained by personal action.
When experiential verification is difficult or unfeasible, social verification is
used, with people evaluating the soundness of their views by checking
them against what others believe. In logical verification people can check
for fallacies in their thinking by deducing from knowledge that is known
what necessarily follows from it.
Such metacognitive activities usually foster veridical thought, but they
can produce faulty thinking as well. Forceful actions arising from erro-
neous beliefs often create social environments that confirm the misbeliefs
(Snyder, 1980). We are all acquainted with problem-prone individuals
who, through offensive behavior, predictively breed negative social cli-
mates wherever they go. Verification of thought by comparison with dis-
torted media versions of social reality can foster shared misconceptions of
people, places, and things (Hawkins & Pingree, 1982). Social verification
can foster bizarre views of reality if the shared beliefs of the reference
group with which one affiliates are peculiar and the group is encapsu-
lated from outside social ties and influences (Bandura, 1982; Hall, 1987).
Deductive reasoning can lead one astray if the propositional knowledge
on which it is based is faulty or biases intrude on logical reasoning
processes (Falmagne, 1975).
Among the self-referent thought, none is more central or pervasive
than people’s belief in their efficacy to exert control over their level of
functioning and events that affect their lives. This core belief is the foun-
dation of human agency (Bandura, 1997; 2001a). Unless people believe
that they can produce desired effects and forestall undesired ones by
their actions, they have little incentive to act. Efficacy beliefs influence
whether people think self-enhancingly or self-debilitatingly, optimisti-
cally or pessimistically; what courses of action they choose to pursue; the
goals they set for themselves and their commitment to them; how much
effort they put forth in given endeavors; the outcomes they expect their
efforts to produce; how long they persevere in the face of obstacles; their
resilience to adversity; how much stress and depression they experience
in coping with taxing environmental demands; and the accomplishments
they realize.
People do not live their lives in individual autonomy. They have to
work together to secure what they cannot accomplish on their own. Social
cognitive theory extends the conception of human agency to collective
agency (Bandura, 1999a, 2000b). The more efficacious groups judge them-
selves to be, the higher their collective aspirations, the greater their moti-
vational investment in their undertakings, the stronger their staying
power in the face of impediments, the more robust their resilience to
adversity, and the higher their performance accomplishments.