Self-efficacy in quick decision making

After reading the posts for this week’s discussion, I was mulling over several ideas in my head and wasn’t sure which direction to take my own post. I decided to peek ahead to one of the readings for next week and was inspired, as I hoped I might be, by one of Bandura’s statements. He stated that “People fear and tend to avoid threatening situations they believe exceed their coping skills, whereas they get involved in activities and behave assuredly when they judge themselves capable of handling situations that would otherwise be intimidating.” For whatever reason, the first thing that came to mind was a time that I was babysitting and the little boy choked on a pistachio. Now, I had taken first aid and CPR courses, but if you had asked me that morning before babysitting about my level of self-efficacy for performing those maneuvers in an actual life or death emergency, I probably would have balked at the idea—it’s an intimidating prospect that I definitely would have said exceeded my coping skills. In the moment that little boy was choking, however, I was able to do exactly what I had learned in my first aid/CPR course to dislodge the pistachio from his airway. We hear stories like this in the news all the time, of the heroic bystander who just jumped to the aid of a stranger, but I wonder how self-efficacy is involved in these situations where you act with seemingly little thought. Obviously, we can make errors in our self-efficacy judgements, as Robin’s post about the skiers illustrates, but how does self-efficacy factor in when you have almost no time to make these judgements? Robin’s skiers had all their previous runs and rides up the chairlift to ponder and make an efficacy judgement about their ability to successfully ski a particular trail or not.

In my situation, the only prior knowledge I had to draw from was from an 8-hour course that I had taken at the age of 12. I had no real performance accomplishment or mastery, I had never seen someone else perform the Heimlich Maneuver in an actual emergency, no one persuaded me to act in that moment—except maybe Teddy, in his highchair turning purple—and I had no time to think about the stress of the situation. My sources for making a self-efficacy judgement (performance accomplishments, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological state) were not paid any attention. While Bandura highlights that contextual features of the environment matter in making self-efficacy judgements, I still am not sure how self-efficacy plays a role in quick decision making and behaviors, and we do this all the time. I may be looking at the concept from the wrong angle, so I’m interested in hearing what others think!

P.S.- Bandura also says, “even success experiences do not necessarily create strong generalized expectations of personal efficacy… When experience contradicts firmly established expectations of self-efficacy, they may undergo little change if the conditions of performance are such as to lead one to discount the import of the experience.” In other words, please don’t look at me if you’re choking… Still not wildly self-efficacious about life-saving!