Self-esteem vs self-efficacy: the difference, and where the two overlap

Self-esteem is your overall evaluation of your own worth. Self-efficacy is your belief that you can do what a specific task requires. A student can be sure that she is a person of worth. That is high self-esteem. The same student can doubt that she can pass a statistics exam. That is low self-efficacy for that exam.

The sociologist Morris Rosenberg published a scale for self-esteem in 1965, and researchers continue to use it. The psychologist Albert Bandura introduced self-efficacy in 1977. The two short definitions are easy to learn. Exam questions are harder, because both terms describe how you see yourself, and courses teach them together. This article gives the definitions in the words of the people who wrote them. It also gives one question that sorts most examples, and it shows where the two terms overlap.

• Self-esteem is a judgment of worth. Self-efficacy is a judgment of capability. In 2006, Bandura called them "entirely different phenomena".
• Self-esteem is global: it is about you as a whole person. Self-efficacy belongs to a task or an area of life, and it changes from one task to the next.
• One can be high while the other is low.
• The AP Psychology framework and the MCAT outline put the two terms together: both contribute to the self-concept.
• The two overlap in questionnaires that measure general self-efficacy. In a 2002 analysis, those scores and self-esteem scores were strongly related.

The difference in one table

A memory aid: efficacy and effect belong together. In the glossary of a 1994 encyclopedia entry, Bandura defined perceived self-efficacy as "people's beliefs about their capabilities to produce effects". Esteem is about value. If you hold a person in high esteem, you value that person.

What self-esteem means

Rosenberg was a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland from 1975 until his death in 1992. The department has pages about his work, and its definition of self-esteem is short: "Self-esteem is a positive or negative orientation toward oneself; an overall evaluation of one's worth or value." The important word is overall. Self-esteem in this sense is not about one skill or one situation.

Rosenberg measured self-esteem with 10 statements. The department's FAQ calls his scale "perhaps the most widely-used self-esteem measure in social science research". The department's description of the scale says that people answer each statement on a four-point scale, from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Rosenberg developed the scale in the 1960s with 5,024 high school students from 10 randomly selected schools in New York State. He described it in his 1965 book, Society and the Adolescent Self-Image. Two statements from a copy of the scale show the type of question:

• "On the whole, I am satisfied with myself."
• "I feel that I'm a person of worth, at least on an equal plane with others."

Neither statement names a task. The scale also has no official border between high and low self-esteem. The FAQ says: "There are no discrete cut-off points to delineate high and low self-esteem." The same pages describe self-esteem as "generally a stable characteristic of adults".

The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines self-esteem through the self-concept. Self-esteem is "the degree to which the qualities and characteristics contained in one's self-concept are perceived to be positive". Esteem is also one of the five levels in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

What self-efficacy means

Bandura introduced the term in a 1977 paper in Psychological Review. In that paper, he separated two expectations:

• An outcome expectancy is "a person's estimate that a given behavior will lead to certain outcomes".
• An efficacy expectation is "the conviction that one can successfully execute the behavior required to produce the outcomes".

The second expectation is self-efficacy. Bandura explained why the difference is important. People can believe that an action leads to a result. But if they have "serious doubts about whether they can perform the necessary activities", that belief "does not influence their behavior".

In the same paper, Bandura wrote that efficacy expectations differ in three ways:

• Magnitude: how difficult a task you believe you can do.
• Generality: how far the belief extends beyond one situation.
• Strength: how well the belief survives a failure.

He also named four sources of these beliefs: performance accomplishments, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion and physiological states. Performance accomplishments are your own successes and failures. Vicarious experience means that you see other people do the task. Bandura called performance accomplishments "especially influential", because they are personal experiences of mastery.

Self-efficacy is not one general quantity. In a 2006 guide to self-efficacy scales, Bandura gave an example: "a business executive may have a high sense of organizational efficacy but low parenting efficacy". He concluded that "the efficacy belief system is not a global trait but a differentiated set of self-beliefs linked to distinct realms of functioning".

For that reason, a questionnaire in Bandura's format lists activities from one area. For each activity, you rate how certain you are that you can do it. The scale goes from 0 ("Cannot do at all") to 100 ("Highly certain can do"). The items say "can do" and not "will do". Bandura gave the reason: "Can is a judgment of capability; will is a statement of intention."

Self-efficacy is a belief. It is not a skill. In 1977, Bandura wrote: "Expectation alone will not produce desired performance if the component capabilities are lacking."

How Bandura separated the two terms

In the 2006 guide, Bandura separated self-efficacy from three terms that people confuse with it: self-esteem, locus of control and outcome expectancies. About self-esteem, he wrote: "Perceived efficacy is a judgment of capability; self-esteem is a judgment of self-worth. They are entirely different phenomena."

The two judgments can differ in the same person. These three examples are illustrations, not research results:

• A student respects herself, but she is sure that she cannot learn to drive a car with manual gears. Her self-esteem is high. Her self-efficacy for that task is low.
• A salesperson is certain that he can complete a difficult sale, but he has a low opinion of himself as a person. His self-efficacy for sales is high. His self-esteem is low.
• A man knows that he cannot sing, and he is satisfied with himself. Low self-efficacy for one task does not mean low self-esteem.

How to sort an exam example

One question sorts most examples: does the person judge their worth, or their capability to do a specific thing? Use these steps:

1. 1.Find the judgment in the example.
2. 2.If the judgment is about the whole person (worth, respect, satisfaction with oneself), answer self-esteem.
3. 3.If the judgment is about a task or an area ("I can", "I cannot"), answer self-efficacy.
4. 4.If the judgment is about the cause of a result (own actions, or luck and other people), answer locus of control.

AP Psychology and the MCAT put the two terms together. The AP Psychology framework says in Topic 4.5 that "self-efficacy and self-esteem both contribute to self-concept". The MCAT outline lists "The role of self-esteem, self-efficacy, and locus of control in self-concept and self-identity". So a question can ask you to separate the two terms. A question can also ask what the two terms share, and the answer is that both contribute to the self-concept.

Self-concept, self-confidence, self-worth and locus of control

Four more terms have meanings close to these two.

Self-concept is the widest term. Rosenberg defined it as the "totality of the individual's thoughts and feelings with reference to himself as an object". The University of Maryland pages call self-esteem "only one component of the self-concept", and they name self-efficacy as another important part.

Locus of control is easy to confuse with self-efficacy. Bandura's example in the 2006 guide separates them. Students can believe that their grades depend completely on their own performance. The same students can feel despondent "because they believe they lack the efficacy to produce those superior academic performances". Our article on locus of control and what Rotter measured explains that term in full.

Where the two overlap: general self-efficacy

The clear difference applies to self-efficacy as Bandura defined it, for a task or an area. The difference becomes smaller when researchers measure self-efficacy as one general trait.

One general measure is the General Self-Efficacy Scale of Ralf Schwarzer and Matthias Jerusalem. Its German version dates from 1979, and the scale is available in 33 languages. It has 10 statements with four possible answers, from "Not at all true" to "Exactly true". Two examples are "I can always manage to solve difficult problems if I try hard enough." and "I can usually handle whatever comes my way." These statements are about capability, but they do not name a task. The authors list this as a weakness: "As a general measure, it does not tap specific behavior change."

Bandura did not accept such measures. "There is no all-purpose measure of perceived self-efficacy," he wrote in the 2006 guide. He argued that general items leave "much ambiguity about exactly what is being measured".

Research supports a part of his concern. In 2002, Timothy Judge and three colleagues examined four traits in four studies: self-esteem, neuroticism, locus of control and general self-efficacy. They reported that measures of the four traits "were strongly related" and that "a single factor explained the relationships". They also reported "relatively poor discriminant validity". Discriminant validity is the evidence that two tests measure different things.

The authors suggested that the four measures "may be markers of the same higher order concept". Researchers call this concept core self-evaluation. A 2012 review defines it as "the fundamental appraisals individuals make about their self-worth and capabilities".

Other researchers found a difference at the general level too. In 2004, Gilad Chen, Stanley Gully and Dov Eden compared general self-efficacy and self-esteem in academic and work samples. General self-efficacy was "more highly related to motivational variables". Self-esteem was "more highly related to affective variables", that is, to feelings. The authors concluded that the two are different in theory and in the data.

The definitions also overlap. One of Rosenberg's 10 statements is about ability: "I am able to do things as well as most other people." The APA Dictionary entry for self-esteem includes a person's "view of their accomplishments and capabilities".

The practical rule has two parts. Self-efficacy for a task and global self-esteem are clearly different. General self-efficacy and self-esteem are closely related, and researchers do not agree on how separate they are.

What each one predicts

For self-esteem, the conclusions changed between 2003 and 2022. In 2003, Baumeister and three colleagues reviewed the evidence. They wrote: "The modest correlations between self-esteem and school performance do not indicate that high self-esteem leads to good performance. Instead, high self-esteem is partly the result of good school performance." They found two types of benefit: "enhanced initiative and pleasant feelings".

In 2022, Ulrich Orth and Richard Robins reviewed newer long-term studies and meta-analyses. They concluded that high self-esteem "helps individuals adapt to and succeed in a variety of life domains". The effects were small: they "average .10 across domains". The authors wrote that this size is comparable to the estimates for other factors, and self-efficacy is one of the factors that they named.

For self-efficacy, the evidence about students is mostly from correlations. A 2012 meta-analysis by Richardson, Abraham and Bond collected 241 data sets on the grades of university students. It compared 50 measures. Performance self-efficacy "was the strongest correlate" of grade point average, and academic self-efficacy had a medium-sized correlation.

A correlation does not show which factor causes the other. Bandura described an effect in two directions in 1977: "Mastery expectations influence performance and are, in turn, altered by the cumulative effects of one's efforts."

What this means when you learn psychology terms

Self-esteem, self-efficacy, self-concept, self-confidence, self-worth and locus of control are six terms with close meanings. Learn them as one set, and practise the differences between them. Our guide on how to memorise psychology terminology puts terms into groups by how easy they are to confuse. Our article on spaced repetition explains why separate study sessions are better than one long session.

You can also apply Bandura's theory to your own study. In his terms, a correct answer in a self-test is a small performance accomplishment. This is our application of his term, not a research result.

Psychology World is made for this type of practice. You look up the six terms and save them to one list of your own. Then you drill the list as flashcards, as multiple-choice questions or by typing the answer. The multiple-choice mode needs a list of at least four terms, and this set has six. The home page shows the four steps of the learning loop and what each study mode does.