Self-efficacy

Albert Bandura has an article about self-efficacy that I have read over and over again. I’ll summarize my own take-aways from it with the hopes that you’ll be interested enough to go see what he REALLY said.

Self-efficacy is a sense of personal effectiveness, a belief that I have the power through my performance to affect the outcomes that matter to me. Self-efficacy beliefs have a big impact on how people think, feel, motivate themselves, behave, and thus perform in a given setting.

There are four ways that people grow in self-efficacy, arranged below from the most effective down to the least — but still effective.

1. Personal mastery: Taking on something that is a little beyond your personal sense of what you can do and then succeeding at it. Personal comment: I was unhappy to discover when I left work temporarily after the birth of my first children that a sense of personal mastery starts to seep away without new experiences. I had thought you got it and then kept it. Not so.
2. Vicarious mastery: Observing people like yourself achieving personal mastery. The more they are like you, the more self-efficacy you gain. Personal comment: Aha! This is the reason that role models matter so much for women in technical work places — and for under-represented minorities everywhere.
3. Social persuasion: “Come on, you can do it. Yes you can.”
4. Interpreting stress reactions in a positive way: self-efficacious people view performance stress as energizing; those without self-efficacy find performance stress debilitating and a sign that they will fail. Personal comment: I still get butterflies in my stomach when I’m about to give a talk. I no longer experience them as a sign that I am going to mess up. Now they are the signals that I’m getting excited about meeting an audience.

When you look for ways to make the people around you more masterful at what they do — your co-workers, employees, children, spouse, friends, etc. — remember Albert Bandura and self-efficacy.

Motivation and Self-determination Theory

A friend of mine sees that the success of her work depends on actions taken by others — specifically others over whom she has no organizational control. She works with two different groups, one of which appears to be more motivated to participate than the other. This gives her an unusual opportunity to observe the differences between the two groups and perhaps use what she learns from one to augment the motivation of people in the other.

This situation reminded me of a paper by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci entitled Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being. This is a very meaty paper, right up there with Albert Bandura’s paper on Self-efficacy as a source of ideas for me. I’ll try to summarize parts of the article here and perhaps in a subsequent posting. If your curiosity carries you further, you can download this paper for personal use from the Overview of Self-Determination Theory site.

←Richard Ryan
←Edward Deci

Intrinsic motivation is self-authored and endorsed and leads to more interest, excitement and confidence than motivation based on external rewards or punishments. Intrinsic motivation is generally inherent in humans and will flourish when circumstances permit.

Intrinsic motivation is strongly affected by three psychological needs, each of which is affected by the social context:

• Competence — Can be increased by optimal level of challenge and effective feedback.
   
  

  Here are links to some musings about effective feedback: Effective Negative Feedback, Effective Positive Feedback, Process Praise versus People Praise.

• Autonomy — Having an internal locus of control, freedom to determine own behavior. Can be increased by having choice, acknowledgement of feelings, and opportunities for self-direction.
   
  

  Interestingly enough, the authors reference a meta-analysis that confirms “that all expected tangible rewards made contingent on task performance do reliably undermine intrinsic motivation.” (p. 70). I don’t think it is quite as simple as removing all contingent rewards — since there can be an evolution to reach intrinsic motivation that goes through various types of extrinsic motivation. But it may explain the frustration that managers find when rewards do not have exactly the impact they expect.

  I have another friend who made big difference in the motivation of the people he managed by giving them explicit goals and then leaving it up to them when and how they worked on the goals. That’s a story for another day.

• Relatedness — Having a sense of security and relatedness. Can be increased by having people around who care about you. This relates to one of the 12 questions that Gallup finds very associated with high productivity work places: “Someone at Work cares about me as a person.”

Ryan and Deci caution that intrinsic motivation occurs only for activities that have intrinsic interest for the person — there has to be a seed of interest before the social context has an impact. But once the seed is there, the social context can make a big difference.

The Great Brain Series

My children loved The Great Brain books by John D. Fitzgerald starting in the 2nd or 3rd grade. I enjoyed reading them out loud immensely.

There’s a good Wikipedia article about this series, so I’ll only give a brief summary here. Each book is a series of episodes about a Catholic family living in southern Utah in the late 1800’s. The narrator is the younger brother of the main character, Tom D. Fitzgerald, otherwise known as The Great Brain because nobody ever seems to get the better of him. The very first chapter is about the installation of the first flush toilet in the whole town at their house and how The Great Brain turns it to his advantage.

I enjoyed the descriptions of life out west, since family was from Idaho, I did some of my growing up there, but my children had never experienced the open skies, sagebrush, and tumbleweeds of western landscapes or bluntness and directness of western culture.

My particular reason for including these books in the positive canon is the way they show an outstanding character strength being used in widely different ways, some morally good, some not. Tom is a paragon of social intelligence, but you can never tell whether he’ll be using it in a particular episode to manipulate people or to help them solve human puzzles that daunt even the adults in his world. He is very aware of his ability — he calls himself The Great Brain. But just when you are wanting to give up on the way he tricks people to get his own way, he exhibits true wisdom and unselfishness. It’s a useful reminder about the power of character strengths and the mixed nature of ways they can be applied.

Besides, the stories in the 7 book series are just plain fun for both children and adults.

Reflections on Voting

We just got back from voting in the North Carolina primary. Voting is an activity that brings back lots of memories…

• About my paternal grandfather who claimed that he never missed an election, not even a local school board race, in his long adult life. As we face the difficult questions about how to end the war in Iraq, I think about his experience as an officer on the Western Front and the letter that he wrote my grandmother about jubilation as World War I ended..
• About my maternal grandparents, one a Democrat, the other a Republican, who went to the polls every election to cancel each other’s votes out. Then the year my grandfather, the Republican, posted a sign in his yard for the Democrat, Frank Church, running for the senate in Idaho. Read about Frank Church who said in 1970, “Our long ordeal in this mistaken war must end. The gathering crisis in our own land, the deepening divisions among our people, the festering, unattended problems here at home, bear far more importantly on the future of our Republic than anything we ever had at stake in Indochina.”
• About my mother cutting up a Nixon bumper sticker in 1960 to form the sentence “Nix on Nixon.” My earliest political memory is her disdain for Nixon’s Checkers speech.
• About the passion I felt working for McGovern — I see the same passion in young people working for Obama today.
• About the horrible ambiguity of the outcome of the presidential election in 2000, and yet the pride I felt that we could still have a peaceable transfer of power.
• About the excitement of this election, that we have both a serious female candidate and a serious African American candidate for president. Much has changed in the United States since the 15th and 19th amendments extended the right to vote to African Americans and women. After 2008, when children are told they can be anything, even president, it will mean much more to little girls and children of color.

A few weeks ago, I met with my Positive Psychology Discussion Group to talk about negative campaigning - why it occurs, whether it serves a purpose. Evolutionarily, the negative is more salient than the positive to people. So for a given budget of ink and robocalls, negative messages may have 3+ times the power of positive messages. Of course there is always the possibility that they may boomerang, like the game we played as children: “I’m rubber and you’re glue. Everything you say bounces off me and sticks to you.”

I personally think it is better to get the possible negatives out of the way so they don’t dog the elected officials, distracting them from the work of forming the necessary compromises that go into governing. That’s one thing about Clinton - we’ve had Clinton dirty linen in front of us for so long that it is hard to believe there is any more. Reverend Wright is a test for Obama. How well does he define his own position rather than letting himself be forced into a “Have you stopped beating your wife?” position.

I’d like to close with Ben Franklin’s words at the end of the Constitutional Convention. He starts, “I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them. For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.” He ends with this plea, “On the whole, Sir, I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility, and, to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.”

I never expect unanimity in our country, but I do hope that however the election turns out, we may all doubt our infallibility, open our ears to other points of view, and find ways to act in common cause.

The Ark and Rowan Farm

When I was growing up, I was attracted to books about children facing very difficult times and finding a way to thrive. There was a fair amount of change and insecurity in my growing up — my father died when I was two, my mother moved her three preschool children to New York City so that she could pursue a Library Science degree, remarried when I was 6, divorced when I was 13, and changed professions when I was 17 — each event causing a major move. I went to 8 different schools in 5 towns, 4 states and 2 countries before I graduated from high school. Looking back, things turned out reasonably well and I gained a lot of resilience by dealing with the many moves. I learned, for example, never to judge how I felt about a new town until I’d been there at least 3 months because I always felt disoriented and lonely in a new place. But along the way, when I didn’t know how things would turn out, it was comforting to read about children who came successfully through much greater insecurity.

The Ark and its sequel, Rowan Farm, by Margot Benary-Isbert are about a German family facing the years right after the end of WWII. They are refugees, having moved several times from their original home in Silesia in east Germany. The father is missing, probably a prisoner of war in Russia. They hope they’ve left enough pointers along their way that he will be able to find them. One of the children was shot by soldiers during the war. The other 4 children range in age from 6 to 16. In the first chapter, they find themselves in a new city quartered with an unwilling landlady and starting to scrounge again for food, fuel, blankets, clothes and work. Everything is in short supply, rationed and involving long waits in line. The older children have put their own dreams on hold to help their mother manage. The younger ones have few memories of their settled home and comfortable life before the war, and so view the changes with more zest and adventurousness.

Over the course of the two books, the older children, Mathias and Margaret, find jobs working on a farm not far out in the country where the farm owner, Mrs. Almut, raises milk sheep, registered Great Danes, and various fruit and vegetable crops. Mrs. Almut had acquired a railroad car before the war that Margaret and Mathias turn into a small home and eventually bring the rest of the family out to join them.

Many small stories work out, people returning home, searching for missing family members, coming to terms with anger and grief, dealing with conflicts between the needs of city folk for food and the resentment of farmers when their animals and crops are requisitioned.

The Lechows face births and deaths. When their father finally finds them, they are grown up beyond his expectation, and he has a hard time re-entering the family. Each family member takes part in the first steps to rebuild Germany, all the red tape and shortages and conflicts. The youngest child and his school mates play a role in resolving the conflicts between original residents and the continuing stream of refugees.

Both of my children found these books engrossing. They loved to hear about life on the farm, baby animals being born. They were amazed by ingenuity the Lechows used to face the hardships of their lives.

The Ark and Rowan Farm are out of print now, but still available through Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Recently I’ve had discussions with people who are worried about whether today’s young people have the gumption to face hard times. At least partly based on these books, I believe that people can rise to meet the demands of their times. Before the war, the Lechows lived a comfortable middle class life. They had no idea what they could do when times got really hard. Neither do we.

Wizard of Oz - an exploration of strengths

When I was going through the MAPP program, one of our assignments was to watch the Wizard of Oz movie — Judy Garland, Somewhere over the rainbow, and all — and to write an essay exploring character strengths based on what we saw.

I suspect that Sherri Fisher’s article in Positive Psychology News Daily, Professor Marvel: Valuing Children’s Strengths, grew out of this assignment. I’m going to post a slightly edited version of mine as a follow-on to yesterday’s post about the Oz books.

This rather a long essay for a blog, so I’ll put the conclusions first. Then you can decide whether to read any further.

• Strengths can be used in ways that are morally questionable as well as morally valuable. The same strengths that made the Wizard of Oz helpful, he used as a con man earlier in the story.
• People carry their strengths with them, but are not necessarily in the right situation to use them. Like Scarecrow down from the pole, a change of circumstance can set strengths free.
• Mirroring back strengths to people is a powerful way to reinforce them.
• You can recognize strengths in people by observing them in action. A questionnaire is helpful, but not necessary. Perhaps the VIA questionnaire serves the same purpose as the diploma, heart and medal did, that is, it gives an aura of authority to observations about strengths, making them easier for people to believe.

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The Wizard of Oz, both the book and the subsequent movie, is a story of four characters searching for their heart’s desires, which they eventually find within themselves. The tension in the story comes from a classic struggle against evil (the wicked witches) and uncovering deception (the wizard as a charlatan). The wizard conflict is particularly interesting, since the wizard is not a simple bad man. In addition his deception, he shows kindness and perception. I loved this book, indeed the whole series, when I was a little girl, and my son loved them as well at the same age. I found the movie more frightening than entertaining when I first saw it at age 5, possibly because of the creepiness of the wicked witch. But I reread the book many, many times.

The five primary characters (excluding Toto the dog, who seems to be the instigator of all the plot twists) are Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tinman, Lion, and the Wizard of Oz himself. Each demonstrates a set of strengths. Each of the first four makes a deep self-discovery.

Dorothy is an exemplar of bravery, persistence, fairness, hope, and especially love. She is courageous in defense of others, defying the lion in defense of Toto, defying the Wizard in defense of Lion, and defying the witch in defense of Scarecrow. She persists in her quest maintaining a high level of hope even after her first disappointment encountering the Wizard. Her sense of fairness shows up when she scolds the Lion, “You ought to be ashamed … when you pick on things smaller and weaker than you,” and when she scolds the Wizard, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, frightening him when he came to you for help.” Dorothy learns that love is central to her life. She chooses the grayness of Kansas over the color of Oz because she learns how much she loves Auntie Em and how much Auntie Em loves her. She both helps her comrades and accepts help from them, practicing the strength of reciprocal love.

Initially, hanging on a pole, Scarecrow is living a life totally unsuited to his strengths — he cannot scare crows away at all. But Dorothy removing him from the pole gives him a chance to discover his strengths: open mindedness, perspective, curiosity, leadership, and kindness. He claims he cannot make up his mind, but he is able to tell Dorothy how to take him off the pole, and he is able to decide which direction to take. His perspective and kindness show up in his frequent encouragement of others and in some of the practical suggestions he makes, such as tricking the apple tree into throwing apples for Dorothy to eat. He does not suffer from hunger, but he understands that Dorothy does. He also knows many words for positive emotions, including “tenderness” and “love,” though it is unlikely that he encountered them often while hanging on a pole. His curiosity shows up frequently, such as when he asks the gateman in Emerald City, “Nobody has seen the great Oz – Then how do you know there is one?” Kindness shows up in his willingness to help Dorothy, “I’ll see you get there whether I get a brain or not.” By exercising his strengths, he demonstrates leadership that causes him to become the ruler of Oz after the Wizard leaves. People look to him for answers.

The strengths of Tinman are not as well presented in the movie, but from the book I remember integrity, kindness, fairness, and citizenship. He thinks he has no heart, but he is actually encumbered with such a soft heart that observing pain in anyone else causes him to weep and then lock up. He is always willing to use his axe in the defense of weaker ones, and he puts the good of the group ahead of his own personal needs. There are times when others must urge him to exercise greater self-regulation so that he can continue functioning without needing constant oiling. In the course of their adventures, he shows love and concern for all the others, and they show love in return. He already had a heart.

Lion is somewhat different, a character whose strengths are working against each other when he is first encountered. His humility and prudence conflict with his personal ideas about valor: as a lion, he believes he should be afraid of nothing, but his good sense makes him recognize danger. Unfortunately for him, this creates a self-defeating vortex. The more he recognizes things to be afraid of, the more cowardly he behaves physically, which makes him under-estimate his own valor a bit more, which lowers the threshold of things that make him afraid. He has a very low threshold indeed when first encountered, “I’m even afraid of myself.” Over the course of the movie, he acts bravely in spite of fear by coming to Dorothy’s aid when she really needs him. These experiences reverse the spiral, allowing him to learn more that he does have the strength of valor and that it is his understanding that is wrong. Courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to control it. Lion’s gratitude and appreciation for beauty make him appealing. Appreciation of beauty is a characteristic that separates him, a flesh and blood creature, from the Scarecrow and Tinman.

The final character, the Wizard of Oz is an interesting blend of bad and good. Back in Kansas, he is the traveling magician who uses whatever information he can furtively gather to show people he knows unexpected things, often to trick them. In Dorothy’s case, he puts his observations together with his social intelligence and kindness when he tries to make Dorothy understand how Auntie Em will feel if Dorothy runs away. He displays considerable humility when his charlatanry as the Wizard of Oz is detected, and he is very aware of his own limitations. In the scene where he hands out the diploma, heart, and medal, he shows social intelligence and kindness by mirroring back strengths. Valor is not one of his strengths. A brave man would not have sent Dorothy to get the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West. He either hoped never to deal with her again or to have her do dirty work that belonged to him as the ruling Wizard of Oz. All in all, it lends depth to the story to have a character that is such an interesting blend of strength and weakness.

Dorothy learns that she has her heart’s desire right in her backyard. Scarecrow and Tinman change circumstances and become able to exercise their strengths and then learn to recognize them. Lion uses his experiences to reverse a downward spiral and come to a more realistic self-appraisal.

The Oz books

The Wizard of Oz is a wonderful book to read aloud. It is witty, quick-paced, and wise. AND it is just the first in a series of 14 books by L. Frank Baum about the kingdom of Oz, each one a new adventure with more and more odd characters, each with their own strengths and quirks. If you are only familiar with the movie, perhaps you don’t know about this treasure trove of books to share with young children. I read them myself almost as soon as I learned to read, and I read them to my children, especially to my son, for several years.

I think my favorite is the 2nd one, The Land of Oz, about the adventures of young boy named Tip. Tip lives with and does chores for a wicked witch. She acquires some powder that she uses to bring alive a stick-limbed pumpkin-headed man that Tip had constructed to scare her. Then she tells Tip she no longer needs him and plans to turn him into a marble statue. He runs away, taking along Jack Pumpkinhead … and the powder.

His adventures include an encounter with the Army of Revolt, composed entirely of girls wielding knitting needles, who take over the Emerald City, deposing the Scarecrow. Tip uses the powder to create two additional creatures to help him out of tight corners, one a wooden scarecrow, the other a flying contraption with two sofas tied together as a body, palm frond wings, and a stuffed gump head.

The Wizard of Oz was published in 1900 and the last book in the series, Glinda of Oz, in 1920 after L. Frank Baum’s death. If you are lucky enough to find some of the originals in used book sales, they bring other qualities to savor — large format pages of thick paper with lots of black and white sketches in addition to color plates.

To support my nomination of these books to the positive canon, here’s how The Land of Oz ends. First the background. In the course of their adventures, the Scarecrow had lost all his straw, and the best replacements available were dollar bills they found in the bottom of a jackdaw nest.

“And I have made the Scarecrow my royal Treasurer,” explained the Tin Woodman. “For it has occurred to me that it is a good thing to have a royal Treasurer who is made of money. What do you think?”

“I think,” said the little Queen, smiling, “that your friend must be the richest man in all the world.”

“I am,” returned the Scarecrow, “but not on account of my money. For I consider brains far superior to money, in every way. You may have noticed that if one has money without brains, he cannot use it to advantage; but if one has brains without money, they will enable him to live comfortably to the end of his days.”

“At the same time,” declared the Tin Woodman, “you must acknowledge that a good heart is a thing that brains can not create, and that money can not buy. Perhaps, after all, it is I who am the richest man in all the world.”

“You are both rich, my friends,” said Ozma, gently; “and your riches are the only riches worth having — the riches of content!”

A Man with an Unusual Purpose

In January, Frank Taylor Wright died, age 90.

For years, I’d heard stories from my children and husband about seeing him walking downtown dressed to the 9’s. He wore suits in a rainbow array of colors, complete with matching pocket squares, shoes, ties, socks, hats, and umbrellas. I’d love to include pictures here, but I haven’t gotten copyright permission. So I’ll just add a few links so that you can see Mr. Wright. Each of these links tells a little more of his story, how he’d get dressed and ride a bus from Durham to Chapel Hill and then stroll along Franklin Street. How he came to visit his grandson’s family for a week and stayed 13 years. How he was buried in a red and black suit to express his exuberance. How his grandson’s family is selling his suits to help pay for the funeral expenses. So here are the links to Mr. Frank Taylor Wright …

• In pink
• In pastel green
• In white
• In blue

He told Artie Dixon, a photographer who did a photo essay about him, “”I have to believe people were born for something, and I was born to dress.”

Seeing him was special — it gave us the same joy as seeing a perfect flower blooming. We miss him!

Interesting definition of happiness

I’ve always been fond of L. M. Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables. I think of her as a great contributor to the positive canon, not just in the Anne stories, which are full of humor and duty and compassion for the human condition. But also in the short stories that she wrote and that Rhea Wilmshurst collected a few years back.

One such collection is called After Many Days. The stories are the continuations of stories that started many years ago — people coming back home who had left and not been heard from, old quarrels revisited, old dreams revived, duty long maintained …

I found this definition of happiness in one of them. I think it’s hard to beat.

Where were the eagerness and zest of new dawns, the earnestness of well-filled, purposeful hours of labour, the satisfaction of a good day worthily lived, at eventide the unbroken rest of long, starry nights? (In the Old Valley, p.65)

The words are in the mind of a man who had left home to become very successful in the business world. After 20 years, he has come back home with a feeling of incompleteness. The story ends with a reunion and these words:

… he understood that he had found his way back to simple happiness and true wisdom, the wisdom of loving and the happiness of being loved. (In the Old Valley, p. 75).

My Father’s Dragon series

One of my friends saw the posting about a Positive Canon of Children’s Books and said she’d love to have ideas for reading to her son, who just latched on to the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books. So this first one is for her - with a series that is great for just-about readers or early readers.

My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett and illustrated by Ruth Chrisman Gannett (not sure which is the mother, which the daughter) was published in 1948, making it 60 years old this year. It was followed in 1950 by Elmer and the Dragon, and then in 1951 by The Dragons of Blueland.

I loved these stories when I was a little girl, and both my children loved them, as have other children to whom I’ve given them or read them.

To begin with, these books are funny. Elmer Elevator (my father) sets out on an adventure to free a baby dragon that has been captured by the animals of Wild Island. On the advice of the cat who told him about the dragon’s plight, he packs “chewing gum, two dozen lollipops, a package of rubber bands, black rubber boots, a compass, a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste, six magnifying glasses, a very sharp jackknife, a comb and hairbrush, seven hair ribbons of different colors, …” Every one of these items plays an important role as he outwits the turtles, boars, tigers, rhinoceros, lion and lioness, gorilla, and crocodiles that stand in his way.

In Elmer and the Dragon, Elmer flies to his home in Nevergreen City on the dragon’s back, having an adventure along the way on an island where he and the dragon help the king, queen, and court of canaries deal with their secret about an unendurable curiosity about buried treasure. What’s in the treasure, in addition to the silver harmonica on which Elmer plays The Bear went over the Mountain? I think this book was the first time I ever heard about skunk cabbage, which turns out to be an important part of a baby dragon’s diet.

In The Dragons of Blueland , the dragon comes to find Elmer again, and flies with him over the coast of Popsicornia back to Blueland to rescue the dragon’s family from hunters who are trying to capture them for zoos. Elmer to the dragon, “Tell me more about your family. Do you all look alike?” Dragon responding, “Oh no. We’ve all got gold-colored wings and red feet and horns, but my father is blue, and my mother is yellow. All my six sisters are green, ranging from yellow-green to blue-green. We boys are all both blue and yellow. I have wide stripes, but two brothers have narrow stripes, one with the stripes going the other way. One has yellow polka dots on blue …” You can imagine the illustrations.

Besides being just plain fun for child and adult, Elmer is a paragon of bravery, persistence, creativity, and social intelligence. In all 3 books, major conflicts are resolved with no bloodshed. In the first book, every animal who gets in Elmer’s way ends up with something it needs taken care of. The canaries have their curiosity assuaged. Even the hunters are chased away with horns and ventriloquism. It’s a great example of win-win solutions that come from interest in others and ingenuity.

Enjoy!