The Legacy of Albert Bandura
Social cognitive theory and "wise interventions"
By Zezhen Wu
When I was in middle school, a girl named Maya transferred to my school. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but she clearly struggled a lot to fit in with the new environment – and I remember she really struggled with learning math. Nowadays, I sometimes wonder – could my teachers have done more to help her?
While a range of approaches can help struggling students, from tutoring and collaborative learning to educational software, we at The Agency Fund are most interested in one particular dimension of Maya’s experience: her personal agency. We define this as the capacity to exert deliberate control over one’s own life.
But what would personal agency have meant for Maya – and for the many students like her today who struggle in school? In this blog, I’ll trace the intellectual roots of the psychology of agency and how it can be put into practice across a range of contexts, including elementary school classrooms.
Personal agency in theory
The Agency Fund’s understanding of personal agency is rooted in the writings of the social psychologist Albert Bandura, who passed away in 2021 – particularly his work on “social cognitive theory.”
Bandura described his perspective on individual and environmental change as “agentic.” He argued individuals are not only products of their environment; they are also producers of it. Through agency, people can select, create, and transform their circumstances, putting humans – the agents of intentional acts – at the center of the change process.
While Bandura’s theory expanded to “proxy agency” (i.e., influencing others to act) and “collective agency” (i.e., working together to achieve shared goals), some of his most influential work focused on personal agency. He described a three-step process for exercising it: beginning with forethought, or setting goals and creating action plans; self-reactiveness, or evaluating our behavior against a personal standard; and finally self-reflectiveness, or reflecting on our capability to address challenges, the soundness of our thoughts and actions, and the values, meaning, and morality of our pursuits. For Bandura, this “meta-cognitive” ability is precisely what makes humans distinctly agentic.
But how can these abstract ideas help students like Maya? As it happens, Bandura’s ideas have had a major influence on how social psychologists think about and design interventions to boost personal agency.
Personal agency in practice
A prominent example is “wise interventions,” developed by social psychologist Gregory Walton. Designed to change how people think or feel in the normal course of their lives, wise interventions operationalize Bandura’s idea that our “meta-cognitive” ability is a central part of personal agency. In other words: how we think and feel about our situation can shape the actuality of our situation.
In particular, wise interventions show that how we interpret our situation is closely connected to three key human needs: our need for understanding, for self-integrity, and for belonging. By designing interventions that are “wise to” how certain underlying psychological processes can help address these needs, the approach has been shown to help people overcome academic challenges, improve health and well-being, and fight prejudice, among other applications.
Wise interventions offer a practical framework for boosting personal agency. Now, let’s use that framework to rethink Maya’s struggles at school – going back in time to my middle school years and looking at the situation from our teacher’s perspective.
Being new in class, it’s clear that Maya feels anxious about making friends and fears that others might not want to be friends with her. In the wise interventions framework, this reflects her need for belonging. It’s also clear that she feels nervous during math exams, which discourages her and makes her worry that she is inherently "bad at math" – reflecting her need for understanding. And while she wants to think well of herself overall, Maya appears worried by the stereotype that girls are not good at math, which threatens her motivation and confidence – reflecting her need for self-integrity.
As Maya’s teacher, how might you use the wise intervention approach to help address these challenges?
Belonging: Supportive classroom dynamics can improve students’ sense of belonging. As Maya’s teacher, you could organize class discussions with older students to share their own experiences with feeling out of place – and how they eventually formed friendships. And you could invite Maya and her peers to give advice to future students, sharing what they have learned and experienced so far.
Understanding: Encouraging a growth mindset – that abilities are not inherent and can improve with practice – can help students’ understanding. You could present a scientific video about how intelligence and abilities develop through effort, effective strategies, and support, or share stories of famous people who overcame setbacks through persistence and learning from mistakes.
Self-integrity: Building students’ self-integrity can help counter challenges like gender stereotypes. You could lead a value-affirmation exercise where students write about their core values like relationships, creativity, or social skills – a tactic shown to reduce the negative effects of previously threatening information.
The main idea is to target Maya’s “construals” – her interpretation and sense of meaning about herself and her situation. When we have positive construals about ourselves and our environment, we are typically more agentic in our behavior.
Combining theory & practice
Bandura’s views on agency underpin a range of theory-based practical applications, like wise interventions, that tailor psychological strategies to effect change. These ideas are also an intellectual inspiration and a practical driving force behind The Agency Fund’s work: we believe that investing in people’s ability to make sense of their experience has enormous potential for helping people flourish in challenging settings. We are excited to be a part of this growing movement and support our grantees as they integrate psychologically informed practices and theories into their programs.
Leading research at the Girls Agency Lab on interventions that are wise and understanding the underlying social-cognitive processes for HOW the interventions work to produce personal agency. Would love to connect.
Loved how you connected and presented Bandura's work with the 'wise interventions'. As someone who has worked with education non profits that suppoeted local communities (with no history of having received formal education) to create and nurture their own schools, I feel it's the same principles that worked in these cases too. The communities realized and exercised their agency by first reflecting on their own self limiting belief about what they can do as a collective; then working towards a goal of creating their own school; and engaging in the continuous process of reflecting on and learning from the progress they were making. It is important that the institutions/organizations that are working with local communities acknowledge that the sense of belonging is really important for communities that are taking their first steps towards formal learning for their kids..they need to feel that they belong to this larger group of people that have their school systems or are getting supported through these school systems and they have to reflect on their own beliefs about their potential, and have aspirations for themselves as a collective ( not just for one child but for children at large ( of their community)).