Values, motivation, persistence, or self-efficacy?

Values, motivation, persistence, self-efficacy. So far, we have discussed about these concepts to explain people’s behavior, without having a happy ending for everyone. I mean, not everyone in the group seems convinced that self-efficacy explains to great extent our behavior. When I listened to people explaining their ideas, sometimes I had the feeling that they were not talking about the same behavioral phenomenon. To become a pattern, a target behavior goes through different stages (from weak to strong pattern) and the effects of the context on this target behavior is different depending on its developmental stage. For example, when the learner starts performing the target behavior, it is very important to provide contingent and continuous reinforcement. In this case, we might say that this particular configuration of the environment drives the learner’s behavior. However, as target behavior becomes stronger it relies less on its immediate consequences. According to Bandura’s proposal, the previous experience of reinforcement strengthens the learner’s sense of efficacy. So, at this point the performance of the target behavior is not affected by the environment as much as it was at the beginning, but it is driven by something “inside” the learner (self-efficacy expectancies). So, based on these expectancies, people make decisions about in what activities engage and how much they are willing to persist. At this point, concepts like motivation and values may play a role in the explanation of people’ behavior. Probably, this won’t convince you and you still think that people’s motivations and values are the principal determinants of their behavior. If so, I would like to ask you how goals become part of the learner’s system goal? Or how people value what they value? Is not that experience? And how different is that from the proposal of operant learning

I wonder if there are empirical studies addressing the differences among these constructs. The discussion around hypothetical scenarios can be confusing sometimes because we omit important information, like people’s history.