Self-efficaty: Cause or reflection of behavioral change?

Bandura has proposed the concept of self-efficacy as the fundamental basis of behavioral change. While the attempt to provide a unifying construct for understanding the effects of various behavior therapy procedures is laudable and likely to stimulate important research on the mechanisms of anxiety reduction, the model itself is less parsimonious than existing learning theory, places too much emphasis on reactive anxiety conceptions of neurosis, and is supported by empirical studies which fail to control a number of confounding variables. It is perhaps heuristic to view self-efficacy as a potentially important reflection of behavioral change mechanisms rather than as the mediator of such change.