Collective efficacy, pyramid schemes, and the classroom

I found this week’s topic of collective efficacy very enlightening. As I was reading, several phenomena (if you can call it that) popped into my head and I realized that collective efficacy explained them rather well. As one example, every few weeks I am privy to an unsolicited Facebook message from at least one female acquaintance I attended high school with encouraging me to live my healthiest/happiest/fittest/financially freest life. At first, I would politely decline further contact, but now that it plagues my social feeds more and more I simply ignore it. In conversations from time to time with friends though, we would ponder how these people we know could buy into these businesses that seem so obviously to be pyramid schemes. This occurrence baffled me, at least until reading about collective efficacy. In Growing Primacy of Human Agency in Adaptation and Change in the Electronic Era (Bandura, 2002), Bandura discusses the self-regulation of health in the wake of technological innovations. While Bandura’s article preceded this plague of “network marketing,” several statements he makes helped me to understand why it works. On the topic of self-regulation of health, for instance, Bandura cites how some individuals need more support and guidance to stay on track, or be more efficacious, in the adoption of a healthy lifestyle. Behold, the power of the girls I went to high school with. All they need do is find the people on their friend lists who lack self-efficacy for lifestyle change. Arguably, however, this is exploiting those with lower self-efficacy in exchange for the promotion of the self-efficacy and collective-efficacy of those soliciting these quick fix products. From the posts I see, the girls I went to high school with highlight their sense of belonging in a group of “likeminded 18-35-year-old girl bosses dedicated to helping you live your best life.” They publish motivational posts about their new best friend Jenny who lost 75 pounds in 11 months, they post about the financial rewards for the effort they expend, and they post about believing in this system wholeheartedly. They gain self-efficacy and collective efficacy by leeching onto those with diminished self-efficacy who express interest in their silver bullet product and promise of “financial freedom.” At the risk of sounding overly cynical, I am sure that for some people it does make a meaningful difference; they get healthier and find a group of people to share this sense of collective efficacy with. For those that fail, however, the financial and efficacy losses are important to acknowledge. Bandura astutely warns to be wary of internet scam artists ready to take advantage of ill-informed consumers. As educators, how can we ensure that we are raising and teaching a generation that heeds this warning? Pyramid schemes and quick fad diets aside, the internet contains a deluge of information that children and adolescents need to know how to critically evaluate. While we may be teaching critical evaluation skills in more typical domains like history and science, are we specifically teaching students internet literacy? Could the role of the pediatrician or health and P.E. teachers evolve to encompass building students’ efficacy for things like positive body image and healthy lifestyle so that students are buffered against these quick fix diet fads that run rampant on social media? Maybe instead of playing dodgeball for two weeks, our time might be better spent teaching students to critically evaluate social media in order to help them understand how to feel efficacious and in control of their health habits.