Equal opportunity

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_opportunity 

Equal opportunity is a state of fairness in which individuals are treated similarly, unhampered by artificial barriers, prejudices, or preferences, except when particular distinctions can be explicitly justified. For example, the intent of equal employment opportunity is that the important jobs in an organization should go to the people who are most qualified – persons most likely to perform ably in a given task – and not go to persons for reasons deemed arbitrary or irrelevant, such as circumstances of birth, upbringing, having well-connected relatives or friends, religion, sex, ethnicity, race, caste, or involuntary personal attributes such as disability, age.

According to proponents of the concept, chances for advancement should be open to everybody without regard for wealth, status, or membership in a privileged group. The idea is to remove arbitrariness from the selection process and base it on some "pre-agreed basis of fairness, with the assessment process being related to the type of position" and emphasizing procedural and legal means. Individuals should succeed or fail based on their efforts and not extraneous circumstances such as having well-connected parents. It is opposed to nepotism and plays a role in whether a social structure is seen as legitimate. The concept is applicable in areas of public life in which benefits are earned and received such as employment and education, although it can apply to many other areas as well. Equal opportunity is central to the concept of meritocracy.

Differing political viewpoints

Equal opportunity for all: "We fight God when our Social System dooms the brilliant clever child of a poor man to the same level as his father", British Admiral Jacky Fisher, Records (1919)

People with differing political viewpoints often view the concept differently. The meaning of equal opportunity is debated in fields such as political philosophy, sociology and psychology. It is being applied to increasingly wider areas beyond employment, including lending, housing, college admissions, voting rights, and elsewhere. In the classical sense, equality of opportunity is closely aligned with the concept of equality before the law and ideas of meritocracy.

Generally, the terms equality of opportunity and equal opportunity are interchangeable, with occasional slight variations; the former has more of a sense of being an abstract political concept while "equal opportunity" is sometimes used as an adjective, usually in the context of employment regulations, to identify an employer, a hiring approach, or the law. Equal opportunity provisions have been written into regulations and have been debated in courtrooms. It is sometimes conceived as a legal right against discrimination. It is an ideal which has become increasingly widespread in Western nations during the last several centuries and is intertwined with social mobility, most often with upward mobility and with rags to riches stories:

The coming President of France is the grandson of a shoemaker. The actual President is a peasant's son. His predecessor again humbly began life in the shipping business. There is surely equality of opportunity under the new order in the old nation.

Theory

Outline of the concept

In a factory setting, equality of opportunity is often seen as a procedural fairness along the lines of "if you assemble twice as many lamps, you'll be paid double" and in this sense the concept is in contrast to the concept of equality of outcome, which might require that all workers be paid similarly regardless of how many lamps they made.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the concept assumes that society is stratified with a diverse range of roles, some of which are more desirable than others. The benefit of equality of opportunity is to bring fairness to the selection process for coveted roles in corporations, associations, nonprofits, universities and elsewhere. According to one view, there is no "formal linking" between equality of opportunity and political structure, in the sense that there can be equality of opportunity in democracies, autocracies and in communist nations, although it is primarily associated with a competitive market economy and embedded within the legal frameworks of democratic societies. People with different political perspectives see equality of opportunity differently: liberals disagree about which conditions are needed to ensure it and many "old-style" conservatives see inequality and hierarchy in general as beneficial out of a respect for tradition. It can apply to a specific hiring decision, or to all hiring decisions by a specific company, or rules governing hiring decisions for an entire nation. The scope of equal opportunity has expanded to cover more than issues regarding the rights of minority groups, but covers practices regarding "recruitment, hiring, training, layoffs, discharge, recall, promotions, responsibility, wages, sick leave, vacation, overtime, insurance, retirement, pensions, and various other benefits".

The concept has been applied to numerous aspects of public life, including accessibility of polling stations, care provided to HIV patients, whether men and women have equal opportunities to travel on a spaceship, bilingual education, skin color of models in Brazil, television time for political candidates, army promotions, admittance to universities and ethnicity in the United States. The term is interrelated with and often contrasted with other conceptions of equality such as equality of outcome and equality of autonomy. Equal opportunity emphasizes the personal ambition and talent and abilities of the individual, rather than his or her qualities based on membership in a group, such as a social class or race or extended family. Further, it is seen as unfair if external factors that are viewed as being beyond the control of a person significantly influence what happens to him or her. Equal opportunity then emphasizes a fair process whereas in contrast equality of outcome emphasizes a fair outcome. In sociological analysis, equal opportunity is seen as a factor correlating positively with social mobility, in the sense that it can benefit society overall by maximizing well-being.

Different types

There are different concepts lumped under equality of opportunity.

Formal equality of opportunity is a lack of (unfair) direct discrimination. It requires that deliberate discrimination be relevant and meritocratic. For instance, job interviews should only discriminate against applicants for job incompetence. Universities should not accept a less-capable applicant instead of a more-capable applicant who can't pay tuition.

Substantive equality of opportunity is absence of indirect discrimination. It requires that society be fair and meritocratic. For instance, a person should not be more likely to die at work because they were born in a country with corrupt labor law enforcement. No one should have to drop out of school because their family needs of a full-time carer or wage earner.

Formal equality of opportunity does not imply substantive equality of opportunity. Firing any employee who gets pregnant is formally equal, but substantively it hurts women more.

Substantive inequality is often more difficult to address. A political party that formally allows anyone to join, but meets in a non-wheelchair-accessible building far from public transit, substantively discriminates against both young and old members as they are less likely to be able-bodied car-owners. However, if the party raises membership dues in order to afford a better building, it discourages poor members instead. A workplace in which it is difficult for persons with special needs and disabilities to perform can considered as a type of substantive inequality, although job restructuring activities can be done to make it easier for disabled persons to succeed. Grade-cutoff university admission is formally fair, but if in practice it overwhelmingly picks women and graduates of expensive user-fee schools, it is substantively unfair to men and the poor. The unfairness has already taken place and the university can choose to try to counterbalance it, but it likely can not single-handedly make pre-university opportunities equal. Social mobility and the Great Gatsby curve are often used as an indicator of substantive equality of opportunity.

Both equality concepts say that it is unfair and inefficient if extraneous factors rule people's lives. Both accept as fair inequality based on relevant, meritocratic factors. They differ in the scope of the methods used to promote them.

Formal equality of opportunity

To illustrate the concept of formal equality of opportunity, suppose two applicants are competing for one position. What happened before the job interview is treated as irrelevant, such as the quality of their earlier education. What matters is that the procedure for evaluating the two applicants is perceived as being fair.

Formal equality of opportunity is sometimes referred to as the nondiscrimination principle or described as the absence of direct discrimination, or described in the narrow sense as equality of access. It is characterized by:

1. Open call. Positions bringing superior advantages should be open to all applicants and job openings should be publicized in advance giving applicants a "reasonable opportunity" to apply. Further, all applications should be accepted.
2. Fair judging. Applications should be judged on their merits, with procedures designed to identify those best-qualified. The evaluation of the applicant should be in accord with the duties of the position and for the job opening of choir director, for example, the evaluation may judge applicants based on musical knowledge rather than some arbitrary criterion such as hair color.
3. An application is chosen. The applicant judged as "most qualified" is offered the position while others are not. There is agreement that the result of the process is again unequal, in the sense that one person has the position while another does not, but that this outcome is deemed fair on procedural grounds.

The formal approach is seen as a somewhat basic "no frills" or "narrow" approach to equality of opportunity, a minimal standard of sorts, limited to the public sphere as opposed to private areas such as the family, marriage, or religion. What is considered "fair" and "unfair" is spelled out in advance. An expression of this version appeared in The New York Times: "There should be an equal opportunity for all. Each and every person should have as great or as small an opportunity as the next one. There should not be the unfair, unequal, superior opportunity of one individual over another."

The formal conception focuses on procedural fairness during the competition: are the hurdles the same height? (photo: athletes Ulrike Urbansky and Michelle Carey in Osaka)

This sense was also expressed by economists Milton and Rose Friedman in their 1980 book Free to Choose. The Friedmans explained that equality of opportunity was "not to be interpreted literally" since some children are born blind while others are born sighted, but that "its real meaning is ... a career open to the talents". This means that there should be "no arbitrary obstacles" blocking a person from realizing their ambitions: "Not birth, nationality, color, religion, sex, nor any other irrelevant characteristic should determine the opportunities that are open to a person – only his abilities".

A somewhat different view was expressed by John Roemer, who used the term nondiscrimination principle to mean that "all individuals who possess the attributes relevant for the performance of the duties of the position in question be included in the pool of eligible candidates, and that an individual's possible occupancy of the position be judged only with respect to those relevant attributes". Matt Cavanagh argued that race and sex should not matter when getting a job, but that the sense of equality of opportunity should not extend much further than preventing straightforward discrimination.

It is a relatively straightforward task for legislators to ban blatant efforts to favor one group over another and encourage equality of opportunity as a result. Japan banned gender-specific job descriptions in advertising as well as sexual discrimination in employment as well as other practices deemed unfair, although a subsequent report suggested that the law was having minimal effect in securing Japanese women high positions in management. In the United States, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued a private test preparation firm, Kaplan, for unfairly using credit histories to discriminate against African Americans in terms of hiring decisions. According to one analysis, it is possible to imagine a democracy which meets the formal criteria (1 through 3), but which still favors wealthy candidates who are selected in free and fair elections.

Substantive equality of opportunity

To illustrate substantive equality of opportunity, suppose there are two applicants competing for one position. Like in the formal model, both applicants are evaluated according to their ability to do the job, but additional considerations factor into the assessment. For example, an applicant from a poorer family is assumed to be at a disadvantage in the competition for the position, and that it wasn't their fault that this happened. So earlier events are factored into the hiring decision. The perceived unfairness is often a justification for educational programs to help less wealthy children become more competitive in the workplace.

The Great Gatsby Curve shows that countries with more equality of wealth also have more social mobility, which indicates that equality of wealth and equality of opportunity go together:

If higher inequality makes intergenerational mobility more difficult, it is likely because opportunities for economic advancement are more unequally distributed among children.

Substantive equality of opportunity, sometimes called fair equality of opportunity, is a somewhat broader and more expansive concept than the more limiting formal equality of opportunity and it deals with what is sometimes described as indirect discrimination. It goes farther and is more controversial than the formal variant; and has been thought to be much harder to achieve, with greater disagreement about how to achieve greater equality; and has been described as "unstable", particularly if the society in question is unequal to begin with in terms of great disparity of wealth. It has been identified as more of a left-leaning political position, but this is not a hard-and-fast rule. The substantive model is advocated by people who see limitations in the formal model:

Therein lies the problem with the idea of equal opportunity for all. Some people are simply better placed to take advantage of opportunity.

— Deborah Orr in The Guardian, 2009

There is little income mobility – the notion of America as a land of opportunity is a myth.

— Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2012

In the substantive approach, the starting point before the race begins is unfair since people have had differing experiences before even approaching the competition. The substantive approach examines the applicants themselves before applying for a position and judges whether they have equal abilities or talents; and if not, then it suggests that authorities (usually the government) take steps to make applicants more equal before they get to the point where they compete for a position and fixing the before-the-starting-point issues has sometimes been described as working towards "fair access to qualifications". It seeks to remedy inequalities perhaps because of an "unfair disadvantage" based sometimes on "prejudice in the past".

According to John Hills, children of wealthy and well-connected parents usually have a decisive advantage over other types of children and he notes that "advantage and disadvantage reinforce themselves over the life cycle, and often on to the next generation" so that successful parents pass along their wealth and education to succeeding generations, making it difficult for others to climb up a social ladder. However, so-called positive action efforts to bring an underprivileged person up to speed before a competition begins are limited to the period of time before the evaluation begins. At that point, the "final selection for posts must be made according to the principle the best person for the job", that is, a less qualified applicant should not be chosen over a more qualified applicant. There are also nuanced views too: one position suggested that the unequal results following a competition were unjust if caused by bad luck, but just if chosen by the individual and that weighing matters such as personal responsibility was important. This variant of the substantive model has sometimes been called luck egalitarianism. Regardless of the nuances, the overall idea is still to give children from less fortunate backgrounds more of a chance, or to achieve at the beginning what some theorists call equality of condition. Writer Ha-Joon Chang expressed this view:

We can accept the outcome of a competitive process as fair only when the participants have equality in basic capabilities; the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair if some contestants have only one leg.

Issues about equal opportunity have been raised about the skin color of runway models at the São Paulo Fashion Week and in 2009 quotas requiring that at least 10 percent of models be "black or indigenous" were imposed as a substantive way to counteract a "bias towards white models", according to one account.

In a sense, substantive equality of opportunity moves the "starting point" further back in time. Sometimes it entails the use of affirmative action policies to help all contenders become equal before they get to the starting point, perhaps with greater training, or sometimes redistributing resources via restitution or taxation to make the contenders more equal. It holds that all who have a "genuine opportunity to become qualified" be given a chance to do so and it is sometimes based on a recognition that unfairness exists, hindering social mobility, combined with a sense that the unfairness should not exist or should be lessened in some manner. One example postulated was that a warrior society could provide special nutritional supplements to poor children, offer scholarships to military academies and dispatch "warrior skills coaches" to every village as a way to make opportunity substantively more fair. The idea is to give every ambitious and talented youth a chance to compete for prize positions regardless of their circumstances of birth.

The substantive approach tends to have a broader definition of extraneous circumstances which should be kept out of a hiring decision. One editorial writer suggested that among the many types of extraneous circumstances which should be kept out of hiring decisions was personal beauty, sometimes termed "lookism":

Lookism judges individuals by their physical allure rather than abilities or merit. This naturally works to the advantage of people perceived to rank higher in the looks department. They get preferential treatment at the cost of others. Which fair, democratic system can justify this? If anything, lookism is as insidious as any other form of bias based on caste, creed, gender and race that society buys into. It goes against the principle of equality of opportunity.

The substantive position was advocated by Bhikhu Parekh in 2000 in Rethinking Multiculturalism, in which he wrote that "all citizens should enjoy equal opportunities to acquire the capacities and skills needed to function in society and to pursue their self-chosen goals equally effectively" and that "equalising measures are justified on grounds of justice as well as social integration and harmony". Parekh argued that equal opportunities included so-called cultural rights which are "ensured by the politics of recognition".

Affirmative action programs usually fall under the substantive category. The idea is to help disadvantaged groups get back to a normal starting position after a long period of discrimination. The programs involve government action, sometimes with resources being transferred from an advantaged group to a disadvantaged one and these programs have been justified on the grounds that imposing quotas counterbalances the past discrimination as well as being a "compelling state interest" in diversity in society. For example, there was a case in São Paulo in Brazil of a quota imposed on the São Paulo Fashion Week to require that "at least 10 percent of the models to be black or indigenous" as a coercive measure to counteract a "longstanding bias towards white models". It does not have to be accomplished via government action: for example, in the 1980s in the United States, President Ronald Reagan dismantled parts of affirmative action, but one report in the Chicago Tribune suggested that companies remained committed to the principle of equal opportunity regardless of government requirements. In another instance, upper-middle-class students taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test in the United States performed better since they had had more "economic and educational resources to prepare for these test than others". The test itself was seen as fair in a formal sense, but the overall result was seen as nevertheless unfair. In India, the Indian Institutes of Technology found that to achieve substantive equality of opportunity the school had to reserve 22.5 percent of seats for applicants from "historically disadvantaged schedule castes and tribes". Elite universities in France began a special "entrance program" to help applicants from "impoverished suburbs".

Equality of fair opportunity

Philosopher John Rawls offered this variant of substantive equality of opportunity and explained that it happens when individuals with the same "native talent and the same ambition" have the same prospects of success in competitions. Gordon Marshall offers a similar view with the words "positions are to be open to all under conditions in which persons of similar abilities have equal access to office". An example was given that if two persons X and Y have identical talent, but X is from a poor family while Y is from a rich one, then equality of fair opportunity is in effect when both X and Y have the same chance of winning the job. It suggests the ideal society is "classless" without a social hierarchy being passed from generation to generation, although parents can still pass along advantages to their children by genetics and socialization skills. One view suggests that this approach might advocate "invasive interference in family life". Marshall posed this question:

Does it demand that, however unequal their abilities, people should be equally empowered to achieve their goals? This would imply that the unmusical individual who wants to be a concert pianist should receive more training than the child prodigy.

Economist Paul Krugman agrees mostly with the Rawlsian approach in that he would like to "create the society each of us would want if we didn't know in advance who we'd be". Krugman elaborated: "If you admit that life is unfair, and that there's only so much you can do about that at the starting line, then you can try to ameliorate the consequences of that unfairness".

Level playing field

The match's outcome is deemed legitimate if there is a level playing field and rules do not favor either player or team arbitrarily. (photo: Cesc Fàbregas duels with Anderson in a football match in 2008)

Some theorists have posed a level playing field conception of equality of opportunity, similar in many respects to the substantive principle (although it has been used in different contexts to describe formal equality of opportunity) and it is a core idea regarding the subject of distributive justice espoused by John Roemer and Ronald Dworkin and others. Like the substantive notion, the level playing field conception goes farther than the usual formal approach. The idea is that initial "unchosen inequalities" – prior circumstances over which an individual had no control, but which impact his or her success in a given competition for a particular post – these unchosen inequalities should be eliminated as much as possible, according to this conception. According to Roemer, society should "do what it can to level the playing field so that all those with relevant potential will eventually be admissible to pools of candidates competing for positions". Afterwards, when an individual competes for a specific post, he or she might make specific choices which cause future inequalities – and these inequalities are deemed acceptable because of the previous presumption of fairness. This system helps undergird the legitimacy of a society's divvying up of roles as a result in the sense that it makes certain achieved inequalities "morally acceptable", according to persons who advocate this approach. This conception has been contrasted to the substantive version among some thinkers and it usually has ramifications for how society treats young persons in such areas as education and socialization and health care, but this conception has been criticized as well. John Rawls postulated the difference principle which argued that "inequalities are justified only if needed to improve the lot of the worst off, for example by giving the talented an incentive to create wealth".

Meritocracy

There is some overlap among these different conceptions with the term meritocracy which describes an administrative system which rewards such factors as individual intelligence, credentials, education, morality, knowledge or other criteria believed to confer merit. Equality of opportunity is often seen as a major aspect of a meritocracy. One view was that equality of opportunity was more focused on what happens before the race begins while meritocracy is more focused on fairness at the competition stage. The term meritocracy can also be used in a negative sense to refer to a system in which an elite hold themselves in power by controlling access to merit (via access to education, experience, or bias in assessment or judgment).

Moral senses

There is general agreement that equality of opportunity is good for society, although there are diverse views about how it is good since it is a value judgement. It is generally viewed as a positive political ideal in the abstract sense. In nations where equality of opportunity is absent, it can negatively impact economic growth, according to some views and one report in Al Jazeera suggested that Egypt, Tunisia and other Middle Eastern nations were stagnating economically in part because of a dearth of equal opportunity. The principle of equal opportunity can conflict with notions of meritocracy in circumstances in which individual differences in human abilities are believed to be determined mostly by genetics as in such circumstances there can be conflict about how to achieve fairness in such situations.

Practical considerations

Difficulties with implementation

There is general agreement that programs to bring about certain types of equality of opportunity can be difficult and that efforts to cause one result often have unintended consequences or cause other problems. There is agreement that the formal approach is easier to implement than the others, although there are difficulties there too.

A government policy that requires equal treatment can pose problems for lawmakers. A requirement for the government to provide equal health care services for all citizens can be prohibitively expensive. If the government seeks equality of opportunity for citizens to get health care by rationing services using a maximization model to try to save money, new difficulties might emerge. For example, trying to ration health care by maximizing the "quality-adjusted years of life" might steer monies away from disabled persons even though they may be more deserving, according to one analysis. In another instance, BBC News questioned whether it was wise to ask female army recruits to undergo the same strenuous tests as their male counterparts since many women were being injured as a result.

Age discrimination can present vexing challenges for policymakers trying to implement equal opportunity. According to several studies, attempts to be equally fair to both a young and an old person are problematic because the older person has presumably fewer years left to live and it may make more sense for a society to invest greater resources in a younger person's health. Treating both persons equally while following the letter of the equality of opportunity seems unfair from a different perspective.

Efforts to achieve equal opportunity along one dimension can exacerbate unfairness in other dimensions. For example, public bathrooms: If for the sake of fairness the physical area of men's and women's bathrooms is equal, the overall result may be unfair since men can use urinals, which require less physical space. In other words, a more fair arrangement may be to allot more physical space for women's restrooms. The sociologist Harvey Molotch explained: "By creating men's and women's rooms of the same size, society guarantees that individual women will be worse off than individual men."

Another difficulty is that it is hard for a society to bring substantive equality of opportunity to every type of position or industry. If a nation focuses efforts on some industries or positions, then people with other talents may be left out. For example, in an example in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a warrior society might provide equal opportunity for all kinds of people to achieve military success through fair competition, but people with non-military skills such as farming may be left out.

Lawmakers have run into problems trying to implement equality of opportunity. In 2010 in Britain, a legal requirement "forcing public bodies to try to reduce inequalities caused by class disadvantage" was scrapped after much debate and replaced by a hope that organizations would try to focus more on "fairness" than "equality" as fairness is generally seen as a much unclear concept than equality, but easier for politicians to manage if they are seeking to avoid fractious debate. In New York City, mayor Ed Koch tried to find ways to maintain the "principle of equal treatment" while arguing against more substantive and abrupt transfer payments called minority set-asides.

Equal opportunity issues are discussed at an army roundtable in Alabama.

Many countries have specific bodies tasked with looking at equality of opportunity issues. In the United States, for example, it is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; in Britain, there is the Equality of Opportunity Committee as well as the Equality and Human Rights Commission; in Canada, the Royal Commission on the Status of Women has "equal opportunity as its precept"; and in China, the Equal Opportunities Commission handles matters regarding ethnic prejudice. In addition, there have been political movements pushing for equal treatment, such as the Women's Equal Opportunity League which in the early decades of the twentieth century, pushed for fair treatment by employers in the United States. One of the group's members explained:

I am not asking for sympathy but for an equal right with men to earn my own living in the best way open and under the most favorable conditions that I could choose for myself.

Global initiatives such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 and Goal 10 are also aimed at ensuring equal opportunities for women at all levels of decision making, and reducing inequalities of outcome.

Difficulties with measurement

The consensus view is that trying to measure equality of opportunity is difficult whether examining a single hiring decision or looking at groups over time.

• Single instance. It is possible to reexamine the procedures governing a specific hiring decision, see if they were followed, and re-evaluate the selection by asking questions such as "Was it fair? Were fair procedures followed? Was the best applicant selected?". This is a judgment call and biases may enter into the minds of decision-makers. The determination of equality of opportunity in such an instance is based on mathematical probability: if equality of opportunity is in effect, then it is seen as fair if each of two applicants has a 50 percent chance of winning the job, that is, they both have equal chances to succeed (assuming of course that the person making the probability assessment is unaware of all variables – including valid ones such as talent or skill as well as arbitrary ones such as race or gender). However, it is hard to measure whether each applicant had a 50 percent chance based on the outcome.
• Groups. When assessing the equal opportunity for a type of job or company or industry or nation, then statistical analysis is often done by looking at patterns and abnormalities, typically comparing subgroups with larger groups on a percentage basis. If equality of opportunity is violated, perhaps by discrimination which affects a subgroup or population over time, it is possible to make this determination using statistical analysis, but there are numerous difficulties involved. Nevertheless, entities such as city governments and universities have hired full-time professionals with knowledge of statistics to ensure compliance with equal opportunity regulations. For example, Colorado State University requires the director of its Office of Equal Opportunity to maintain extensive statistics on its employees by job category as well as minorities and gender. In Britain, Aberystwyth University collects information including the "representation of women, men, members of racial or ethnic minorities and people with disabilities amongst applicants for posts, candidates interviewed, new appointments, current staff, promotions and holders of discretionary awards" to comply with equal opportunity laws.

It is difficult to prove unequal treatment although statistical analysis can provide indications of problems, it is subject to conflicts over interpretation and methodological issues. For example, a study in 2007 by the University of Washington examined its treatment of women. Researchers collected statistics about female participation in numerous aspects of university life, including percentages of women with full professorships (23 percent), enrollment in programs such as nursing (90 pperpercentd engineerings (18 percent). There is wide variation in how these statistics might be interpreted. For example, the 23 percent figure for women with full professorships could be compared to the total population of women (presumably 50 percent) perhaps using census data, or it might be compared to the percentage of women with full professorships at competing universities. It might be used in an analysis of how many women applied for the position of full professor compared to how many women attained this position. Further, the 23 percent figure could be used as a benchmark or baseline figure as part of an ongoing longitudinal analysis to be compared with future surveys to track progress over time. In addition, the strength of the conclusions is subject to statistical issues such as sample size and bias. For reasons such as these, there is considerable difficulty with most forms of statistical interpretation.

A computerized statistical analysis suggested nepotism and practice of unequal opportunity within Italy's academic community. (photo: University of Bari)

Statistical analysis of equal opportunity has been done using sophisticated examinations of computer databases. An analysis in 2011 by University of Chicago researcher Stefano Allesina examined 61,000 names of Italian professors by looking at the "frequency of last names", doing one million random drawings and he suggested that Italian academia was characterized by violations of equal opportunity practices as a result of these investigations. The last names of Italian professors tended to be similar more often than predicted by random chance. The study suggested that newspaper accounts showing that "nine relatives from three generations of a single-family (were) on the economics faculty" at the University of Bari were not aberrations, but indicated a pattern of nepotism throughout Italian academia.

There is support for the view that often equality of opportunity is measured by the criteria of equality of outcome, although with difficulty. In one example, an analysis of relative equality of opportunity was done based on outcomes, such as a case to see whether hiring decisions were fair regarding men versus women – the analysis was done using statistics based on average salaries for different groups. In another instance, a cross-sectional statistical analysis was conducted to see whether social class affected participation in the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War: a report in Time by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggested that soldiers came from a variety of social classes and that the principle of equal opportunity had worked, possibly because soldiers had been chosen by a lottery process for conscription. In college admissions, equality of outcome can be measured directly by comparing offers of admission given to different groups of applicants: for example, there have been reports in newspapers of discrimination against Asian Americans regarding college admissions in the United States which suggest that Asian American applicants need higher grades and test scores to win admission to prestigious universities than other ethnic groups.

Marketplace considerations

Equal opportunity has been described as a fundamental basic notion in business and commerce and described by economist Adam Smith as a basic economic precept. There has beeresearchng suggesting that "competitive markets will tend to drive out such discrimination" since employers or institutions which hire based on arbitrary criteria will be weaker as a result and not perform as well as firms that embrace equality of opportunity. Firms competing for overseas contracts have sometimes argued in the press for equal chances during the bidding process, such as when American oil corporations wanted equal shots at developing oil fields in Sumatra; and firms, seeing how fairness is beneficial while competing for contracts, can apply the lesson to other areas such as internal hiring and promotion decisions. A report in USA Today suggested that the goal of equal opportunity was "being achieved throughout most of the business and government labor markets because major employers pay based on potential and actual productivity".

Fair opportunity practices include measures taken by an organization to ensure efficiency effectiveness and fairness in the employment process. A basic definition of equality is the idea of equal treatment and respect. In job advertisements and descriptions, the fact that the employer is an equal opportunity employer is sometimes indicated by the abbreviations EOE or MFDV, which stands for Minority, Female, Disabled, Veteran. Analyst Ross Douthat in The New York Times suggested that equality of opportunity depends on a rising economy which brings new chances for upward mobility and he suggested that greater equality of opportunity is more easily achieved during "times of plenty". Efforts to achieve equal opportunity can rise and recede, sometimes as a result of economic conditions or political choices. Empirical evidence from public health research also suggests that equality of opportunity is linked to better health outcomes in the United States and Europe.

History

According to professor David Christian of Macquarie University, an underlying Big History trend has been a shift from seeing people as resources to exploiting towards a perspective of seeing people as individuals to empower. According to Christian, in many ancient agrarian civilizations, roughly nine of every ten persons was a peasant exploited by a ruling class. In the past thousand years, there has been a gradual movement in the direction of greater respect for equal opportunity as political structures based on generational hierarchies and feudalism broke down during the late Middle Ages and new structures emerged during the Renaissance. Monarchies were replaced by democracies: kings were replaced by parliaments and congresses. Slavery was also abolished generally. The new entity of the nation state emerged with highly specialized parts, including corporations, laws, and new ideas about citizenship as well as values about individual rights found expression in constitutions, laws, and statutes.

African-American civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall fought numerous battles in the courts for equal opportunity for all races in the United States; argued the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case and won, and in 1967 was appointed to the Supreme Court.

In the United States, one legal analyst suggested that the real beginning of the modern sense of equal opportunity was in the Fourteenth Amendment which provided "equal protection under the law". The amendment did not mention equal opportunity directly, but it helped undergird a series of later rulings which dealt with legal struggles, particularly by African Americans and later women, seeking greater political and economic power in the growing republic. In 1933, a congressional "Unemployment Relief Act" forbade discrimination "based on race, color, or creed". The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision furthered government initiatives to end discrimination.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925 which enabled a presidential committee on an equal opportunity, which was soon followed by President Lyndon B. Johnson's Executive Order 11246. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 became the legal underpinning of equal opportunity in employment. Businesses and other organizations learned to comply with the rulings by specifying fair hiring and promoting practices and posting these policy notices on bulletin boards, employee handbooks, and manuals as well ain s training sessions and films. Courts dealt with issues about equal opportunities, such as the 1989 Wards Cove decision, the Supreme Court ruled that statistical evidence by itself was insufficient to prove racial discrimination. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was established, sometimes reviewing charges of discrimination cases which numbered in the tens of thousands annually during the 1990s. Some law practices specialized in employment law. The conflict between formal and substantive approaches manifested itself in backlashes, sometimes described as reverse discrimination, such as the Bakke case when a white male applicant to medical school sued based on being denied admission because of a quota system preferring minority applicants. In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibited discrimination against disabled persons, including cases of equal opportunity. In 2008, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act prevents employers from using genetic information when hiring, firing, or promoting employees.

Measures

Many economists measure the degree of equal opportunity with measures of economic mobility. For instance, Joseph Stiglitz asserts that with five economic divisions and full equality of opportunity, "20 percent of those in the bottom fifth would see their children in the bottom fifth. Denmark almost achieves that – 25 percent are stuck there. Britain, supposedly notorious for its class divisions, does only a little worse (30 percent). That means they have a 70 percent chance of moving up. The chances of moving up in America, though, are markedly smaller (only 58 percent of children born to the bottom group make it out), and when they do move up, they tend to move up only a little". Similar analyses can be performed for each economic division and overall. They all show how far from the ideal all industrialized nations are and how correlated measures of equal opportunity are with income inequality and wealth inequality. Equal opportunity has ramifications beyond income; the American Human Development Index, rooted in the capabilities approach pioneered by Amartya Sen, is used to measure opportunity across geographies in the U.S. using health, education, and standard of living outcomes.

Criticism

There is agreement that the concept of equal opportunity lacks a precise definition. While it generally describes "open and fair competition" with equal chances for achieving sought-after jobs or positions as well as an absence of discrimination, the concept is elusive with a "wide range of meanings". It is hard to measure, and implementation poses problems as well as disagreements about what to do.

There have been various criticisms directed at both the substantive and formal approaches. One account suggests that left-leaning thinkers who advocate equality of outcome fault even formal equality of opportunity because it "legitimates inequalities of wealth and income". John W. Gardner suggested several views: (1) that inequalities will always exist regardless of trying to erase them; (2) that bringing everyone "fairly to the starting line" without dealing with the "destructive competitiveness that follows"; (3) any equalities achieved will entail future inequalities. Substantive equality of opportunity has led to concerns that efforts to improve fairness "ultimately collapses into the different one of equality of outcome or condition".

Economist Larry Summers advocated an approach of focusing on equality of opportunity and not equality of outcomes and that the way to strengthen equal opportunity was to bolster public education. A contrasting report in The Economist criticized efforts to contrast equality of opportunity and equality of outcome as being opposite poles on a hypothetical ethical scale, such that equality of opportunity should be the "highest ideal" while equality of outcome was "evil". Rather, the report argued that any difference between the two types of equality was illusory and that both terms were highly interconnected. According to this argument, wealthier people have greater opportunities – wealth itself can be considered as "distilled opportunity" – and children of wealthier parents have access to better schools, health care, nutrition and so forth. Accordingly, people who endorse equality of opportunity may like the idea of it in principle, yet at the same time, they would be unwilling to take the extreme steps or "titanic interventions" necessary to achieve real intergenerational equality. A slightly different view in The Guardian suggested that equality of opportunity was merely a "buzzword" to sidestep the thornier political question of income inequality.

There is speculation that since equality of opportunity is only one of sometimes competing "justice norms", there is a risk that following equality of opportunity too strictly might cause problems in other areas. A hypothetical example was suggested: suppose wealthier people gave excessive amounts of campaign contributions; suppose further that these contributions resulted in better regulations, and then laws limiting such contributions based on equal opportunity for all political participants may have the unintended long term consequence of making political decision-making lackluster and possibly hurting the groups that it was trying to protect. Philosopher John Kekes makes a similar point in his book The Art of Politics in which he suggests that there is a danger to elevating any one particular political good – including equality of opportunity – without balancing competing goods such as justice, property rights and others. Kekes advocated having a balanced perspective, including a continuing dialog between cautionary elements and reform elements. A similar view was expressed by Ronald Dworkin in The Economist:

It strikes us as wrong – or not right – that some people starve while others have private jets. We are uncomfortable when university professors earn less, for example than junior lawyers. But equality appears to pull against other important ideals such as liberty and efficiency.

Economist Paul Krugman sees equality of opportunity as a "non-Utopian compromise" which works and is a "pretty decent arrangement" which varies from country to country. However, there are differing views such as by Matt Cavanagh, who criticised equality of opportunity in his 2002 book Against Equality of Opportunity. Cavanagh favored a limited approach of opposing specific kinds of discrimination as steps to help people get greater control over their lives.

Conservative thinker Dinesh D'Souza criticized equality of opportunity on the basis that "it is an ideal that cannot and should not be realized through the actions of the government" and added that "for the state to enforce equal opportunity would be to contravene the true meaning of the Declaration and to subvert the principle of a free society". D'Souza described how his parenting undermined equality of opportunity:

I have a five-year-old daughter. Since she was born ... my wife and I have gone to great lengths in the Great Yuppie Parenting Race. ... My wife goes over her workbooks. I am teaching her chess. Why are we doing these things? We are, of course, trying to develop her abilities so that she can get the most out of life. The practical effect of our actions, however, is that we are working to give our daughter an edge – that is, a better chance to succeed than everybody else's children. Even though we might be embarrassed to think of it this way, we are doing our utmost to undermine equal opportunity. So are all the other parents who are trying to get their children into the best schools

Equal opportunity theorists generally agree that once the race begins, who wins is a function of talent, hard work, and competitive drive. (photo: runner Billy Mills crossing the finish line in the 1964 Olympics)

D'Souza argued that it was wrong for the government to try to bring his daughter down, or to force him to raise other people's children, but a counterargument is that there is a benefit to everybody, including D'Souza's daughter, to have a society with less anxiety about downward mobility, less class resentment, and less possible violence.

An argument similar to D'Souza's was raised in Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick, who wrote that the only way to achieve equality of opportunity was "directly worsening the situations of those more favored with opportunity, or by improving the situation of those less well-favored". Nozick gave an argument of two suitors competing to marry one "fair lady": X was plain while Y was better looking and more intelligent. If Y did not exist, then "fair lady" would have married X, but Y exists and so she marries Y. Nozick asks: "Does suitor X have a legitimate complaint against Y based on unfairness since Y did not earn his good looks or intelligence?". Nozick suggests that there are no grounds for complaint. Nozick argued against equality of opportunity because it violates the rights of property since the equal opportunity maxim interferes with an owner's right to do what he or she pleases with a property.

Property rights were a major component of the philosophy of John Locke and are sometimes referred to as "Lockean rights". The sense of the argument is along these lines: equal opportunity rules regarding, say, a hiring decision within a factory, made to bring about greater fairness, violate a factory owner's rights to run the factory as he or she sees best; it has been argued that a factory owner's right to property encompasses all decision-making within the factory as being part of those property rights. That some people's "natural assets" were unearned is irrelevant to the equation according to Nozick and he argued that people are nevertheless entitled to enjoy these assets and other things freely given by others.

Friedrich Hayek felt that luck was too much of a variable in economics, such that one can not devise a system with any kind of fairness when many market outcomes are unintended. By sheer chance or random circumstances, a person may become wealthy just by being in the right place and time and Hayek argued that it is impossible to devise a system to make opportunities equal without knowing how such interactions may play out. Hayek saw not only equality of opportunity, but all of social justice as a "mirage".

Some conceptions of equality of opportunity, particularly the substantive and level playing field variants, have been criticized on the basis that they make assumptions to the effect that people have similar genetic makeups. Other critics have suggested that social justice is more complex than mere equality of opportunity. Nozick made the point that what happens in society can not always be reduced to competition for a coveted position and in 1974 wrote that "life is not a race in which we all compete for a prize which someone has established", that there is "no unified race" and there is not someone person "judging swiftness".

Composite number

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Demonstration, with Cuisenaire rods, of the divisors of the composite number 10

Composite numbers can be arranged into rectangles but prime numbers cannot.

A composite number is a positive integer that can be formed by multiplying two smaller positive integers. Equivalently, it is a positive integer that has at least one divisor other than 1 and itself. Every positive integer is composite, prime, or the unit 1, so the composite numbers are exactly the numbers that are not prime and not a unit.

For example, the integer 14 is a composite number because it is the product of the two smaller integers 2 × 7. Likewise, the integers 2 and 3 are not composite numbers because each of them can only be divided by one and itself.

The composite numbers up to 150 are:

4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 102, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150. (sequence A002808 in the OEIS)

Every composite number can be written as the product of two or more (not necessarily distinct) primes. For example, the composite number 299 can be written as 13 × 23, and the composite number 360 can be written as 2³ × 3² × 5; furthermore, this representation is unique up to the order of the factors. This fact is called the fundamental theorem of arithmetic.

There are several known primality tests that can determine whether a number is prime or composite, without necessarily revealing the factorization of a composite input.

Types

One way to classify composite numbers is by counting the number of prime factors. A composite number with two prime factors is a semiprime or 2-almost prime (the factors need not be distinct, hence squares of primes are included). A composite number with three distinct prime factors is a sphenic number. In some applications, it is necessary to differentiate between composite numbers with an odd number of distinct prime factors and those with an even number of distinct prime factors. For the latter

${\displaystyle \mu (n)=(-1{)}^{2x}=1}$

(where μ is the Möbius function and x is half the total of prime factors), while for the former

${\displaystyle \mu (n)=(-1{)}^{2x+1}=-1.}$

However, for prime numbers, the function also returns −1 and ${\displaystyle \mu (1)=1}$. For a number n with one or more repeated prime factors,

${\displaystyle \mu (n)=0}$.

If all the prime factors of a number are repeated it is called a powerful number (All perfect powers are powerful numbers). If none of its prime factors are repeated, it is called squarefree. (All prime numbers and 1 are squarefree.)

For example, 72 = 2³ × 3², all the prime factors are repeated, so 72 is a powerful number. 42 = 2 × 3 × 7, none of the prime factors are repeated, so 42 is squarefree.

Euler diagram of numbers under 100:

   Abundant

   Primitive abundant

   Highly abundant

   Superabundant and highly composite

   Colossally abundant and superior highly composite

   Weird

   Perfect

   Composite

   Deficient

Another way to classify composite numbers is by counting the number of divisors. All composite numbers have at least three divisors. In the case of squares of primes, those divisors are ${\displaystyle \{1,p,p^2\}}$. A number n that has more divisors than any x < n is a highly composite number (though the first two such numbers are 1 and 2).

Composite numbers have also been called "rectangular numbers", but that name can also refer to the pronic numbers, numbers that are the product of two consecutive integers.

Yet another way to classify composite numbers is to determine whether all prime factors are either all below or all above some fixed (prime) number. Such numbers are called smooth numbers and rough numbers, respectively.

Recreational mathematics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreational_mathematics

Recreational mathematics is mathematics carried out for recreation (entertainment) rather than as a strictly research- and application-based professional activity or as a part of a student's formal education. Although it is not necessarily limited to being an endeavor for amateurs, many topics in this field require no knowledge of advanced mathematics. Recreational mathematics involves mathematical puzzles and games, often appealing to children and untrained adults and inspiring their further study of the subject.

The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) includes recreational mathematics as one of its seventeen Special Interest Groups, commenting:

Recreational mathematics is not easily defined because it is more than mathematics done as a diversion or playing games that involve mathematics. Recreational mathematics is inspired by deep ideas that are hidden in puzzles, games, and other forms of play. The aim of the SIGMAA on Recreational Mathematics (SIGMAA-Rec) is to bring together enthusiasts and researchers in the myriad of topics that fall under recreational math. We will share results and ideas from our work, show that real, deep mathematics is there awaiting those who look, and welcome those who wish to become involved in this branch of mathematics.

Mathematical competitions (such as those sponsored by mathematical associations) are also categorized under recreational mathematics.

Topics

Some of the more well-known topics in recreational mathematics are Rubik's Cubes, magic squares, fractals, logic puzzles and mathematical chess problems, but this area of mathematics includes the aesthetics and culture of mathematics, peculiar or amusing stories and coincidences about mathematics, and the personal lives of mathematicians.

Mathematical games

Mathematical games are multiplayer games whose rules, strategies, and outcomes can be studied and explained using mathematics. The players of the game may not need to use explicit mathematics in order to play mathematical games. For example, Mancala is studied in the mathematical field of combinatorial game theory, but no mathematics is necessary in order to play it.

Mathematical puzzles

Mathematical puzzles require mathematics in order to solve them. They have specific rules, as do multiplayer games, but mathematical puzzles do not usually involve competition between two or more players. Instead, in order to solve such a puzzle, the solver must find a solution that satisfies the given conditions.

Logic puzzles and classical ciphers are common examples of mathematical puzzles. Cellular automata and fractals are also considered mathematical puzzles, even though the solver only interacts with them by providing a set of initial conditions.

As they often include or require game-like features or thinking, mathematical puzzles are sometimes also called mathematical games.

Mathemagics

Magic tricks based on mathematical principles can produce self-working but surprising effects. For instance, a mathemagician might use the combinatorial properties of a deck of playing cards to guess a volunteer's selected card, or Hamming codes to identify whether a volunteer is lying.

Other activities

Other curiosities and pastimes of non-trivial mathematical interest include:

• patterns in juggling
• the sometimes profound algorithmic and geometrical characteristics of origami
• patterns and process in creating string figures such as Cat's cradles, etc.
• fractal-generating software

Online blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels

There are many blogs and audio or video series devoted to recreational mathematics. Among the notable are the following:

• Cut-the-knot by Alexander Bogomolny
• Futility Closet by Greg Ross
• Numberphile by Brady Haran
• Mathologer by Burkard Polster
• 3Blue1Brown by Grant Sanderson
• The videos of Vi Hart
• Stand-Up Maths by Matt Parker

Publications

• The journal Eureka published by the mathematical society of the University of Cambridge is one of the oldest publications in recreational mathematics. It has been published 60 times since 1939 and authors have included many famous mathematicians and scientists such as Martin Gardner, John Conway, Roger Penrose, Ian Stewart, Timothy Gowers, Stephen Hawking and Paul Dirac.
• The Journal of Recreational Mathematics was the largest publication on this topic from its founding in 1968 until 2014 when it ceased publication.
• Mathematical Games (1956 to 1981) was the title of a long-running Scientific American column on recreational mathematics by Martin Gardner. He inspired several generations of mathematicians and scientists through his interest in mathematical recreations. "Mathematical Games" was succeeded by 25 "Metamagical Themas" columns (1981-1983), a similarly distinguished, but shorter-running, column by Douglas Hofstadter, then by 78 "Mathematical Recreations" and "Computer Recreations" columns (1984 to 1991) by A. K. Dewdney, then by 96 "Mathematical Recreations" columns (1991 to 2001) by Ian Stewart, and most recently "Puzzling Adventures" by Dennis Shasha.
• The Recreational Mathematics Magazine, published by the Ludus Association, is electronic and semiannual, and focuses on results that provide amusing, witty but nonetheless original and scientifically profound mathematical nuggets. The issues are published in the exact moments of the equinox.

Self-efficacy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-efficacy 

In psychology, self-efficacy is an individual's belief in their capacity to act in the ways necessary to reach specific goals. The concept was originally proposed by the psychologist Albert Bandura.

Self-efficacy affects every area of human endeavor. By determining the beliefs a person holds regarding their power to affect situations, self-efficacy strongly influences both the power a person actually has to face challenges competently and the choices a person is most likely to make. These effects are particularly apparent, and compelling, with regard to investment behaviors such as in health, education, and agriculture.

A strong sense of self-efficacy promotes human accomplishment and personal well-being. A person with high self-efficacy views challenges as things that are supposed to be mastered rather than threats to avoid. These people are able to recover from failure faster and are more likely to attribute failure to a lack of effort. They approach threatening situations with the belief that they can control them. These things have been linked to lower levels of stress and a lower vulnerability to depression.

In contrast, people with a low sense of self-efficacy view difficult tasks as personal threats and shy away from them. Difficult tasks lead them to look at the skills they lack rather than the ones they have. It is easy for them to lose faith in their own abilities after a failure. Low self-efficacy can be linked to higher levels of stress and depression.

Theoretical approaches

Social cognitive theory

Main article: Social cognitive theory

Psychologist Albert Bandura has defined self-efficacy as one's belief in one's ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task. One's sense of self-efficacy can play a major role in how one approaches goals, tasks, and challenges. The theory of self-efficacy lies at the center of Bandura's social cognitive theory, which emphasizes the role of observational learning and social experience in the development of personality. The main concept in social cognitive theory is that an individual's actions and reactions, including social behaviors and cognitive processes, in almost every situation are influenced by the actions that individual has observed in others. Because self-efficacy is developed from external experiences and self-perception and is influential in determining the outcome of many events, it is an important aspect of social cognitive theory. Self-efficacy represents the personal perception of external social factors. According to Bandura's theory, people with high self-efficacy—that is, those who believe they can perform well—are more likely to view difficult tasks as something to be mastered rather than something to be avoided.

Social learning theory

Main article: Social learning theory

Social learning theory describes the acquisition of skills that are developed exclusively or primarily within a social group. Social learning depends on how individuals either succeed or fail at dynamic interactions within groups, and promotes the development of individual emotional and practical skills as well as accurate perception of self and acceptance of others. According to this theory, people learn from one another through observation, imitation, and modeling. Self-efficacy reflects an individual's understanding of what skills he/she can offer in a group setting.

Self-concept theory

Main article: Self-concept

Self-concept theory seeks to explain how people perceive and interpret their own existence from clues they receive from external sources, focusing on how these impressions are organized and how they are active throughout life. Successes and failures are closely related to the ways in which people have learned to view themselves and their relationships with others. This theory describes self-concept as learned (i.e., not present at birth); organized (in the way it is applied to the self); and dynamic (i.e., ever-changing, and not fixed at a certain age).

Attribution theory

Main article: Attribution (psychology)

Attribution theory focuses on how people attribute events and how those beliefs interact with self-perception. Attribution theory defines three major elements of cause:

• Locus is the location of the perceived cause. If the locus is internal (dispositional), feelings of self-esteem and self-efficacy will be enhanced by success and diminished by failure.
• Stability describes whether the cause is perceived as static or dynamic over time. It is closely related to expectations and goals, in that when people attribute their failures to stable factors such as the difficulty of a task, they will expect to fail in that task in the future.
• Controllability describes whether a person feels actively in control of the cause. Failing at a task one thinks one cannot control can lead to feelings of humiliation, shame, and/or anger.

Sources of self-efficacy

Mastery experiences

According to Bandura, the most effective way to build self-efficacy is to engage in mastery experiences. These mastery experiences can be defined as a personal experience of success. Achieving difficult goals in the face of adversity helps build confidence and strengthen perseverance.

Vicarious experiences of social models

Another source of self-efficacy is through vicarious experiences of social models. Seeing someone, who you view as similar to yourself, succeed at something difficult can motivate you to believe that you have the skills necessary to achieve a similar goal. However, the inverse of the previous statement is true as well. Seeing someone fail at a task can lead to doubt in personal skills and abilities. "The greater the assumed similarity, the more persuasive are the models' successes and failures."

Belief in success

A third source of self-efficacy is found through strengthening the belief that one has the ability to succeed. Those who are positively persuaded that they have the ability to complete a given task show a greater and more sustained effort to complete a task. It also lowers the effect of self-doubt in a person. However, it is important to remember that those who are doing the encouraging, put the person in a situation where success is more often likely to be attained. If they are put in a situation prematurely with no hope of any success, it can undermine self-efficacy.

Physiological and psychological states

A person's emotional and physiological state can also influence an individual's belief about their ability to perform in a given situation. When judging their own capabilities, people will often take in information from their body, how a person interprets that information impacts self-efficacy. For example, in activities that require physical strength, someone may take fatigue or pain as an indicator of inability or of effort.

How it affects human function

Choices regarding behavior

People generally avoid tasks where self-efficacy is low, but undertake tasks where self-efficacy is high. When self-efficacy is significantly beyond actual ability, it leads to an overestimation of the ability to complete tasks. On the other hand, when self-efficacy is significantly lower than actual ability, it discourages growth and skill development. Research shows that the optimum level of self-efficacy is slightly above ability; in this situation, people are most encouraged to tackle challenging tasks and gain experience. Self-efficacy is made of dimensions like magnitude, strength, and generality to explain how one believes they will perform on a specific task.

Motivation

High self-efficacy can affect motivation in both positive and negative ways. In general, people with high self-efficacy are more likely to make efforts to complete a task, and to persist longer in those efforts, than those with low self-efficacy. The stronger the self-efficacy or mastery expectations, the more active the efforts.

A negative effect of low self-efficacy is that it can lead to a state of learned helplessness. Learned helplessness was studied by Martin Seligman in an experiment in which shocks were applied to animals. Through the experiment, it was discovered that the animals placed in a cage where they could escape shocks by moving to a different part of the cage did not attempt to move if they had formerly been placed in a cage in which escape from the shocks was not possible. Low self-efficacy can lead to this state in which it is believed that no amount of effort will make a difference in the success of the task at hand.

Work performance

Self-efficacy theory has been embraced by management scholars and practitioners because of its applicability in the workplace. Overall, self-efficacy is positively and strongly related to work-related performance as measured by the weighted average correlation across 114 selected studies. The strength of the relationship, though, is moderated by both task complexity and environmental context. For more complex tasks, the relationships between self-efficacy and work performance is weaker than for easier work-related tasks. In actual work environments, which are characterized by performance constraints, ambiguous demands, deficient performance feedback, and other complicating factors, the relationship appears weaker than in controlled laboratory settings. The implications of this research is that managers should provide accurate descriptions of tasks and provide clear and concise instructions. Moreover, they should provide the necessary supporting elements, including training employees in developing their self-efficacy in addition to task-related skills, for employees to be successful. It has also been suggested that managers should factor in self-efficacy when trying to decide candidates for developmental or training programs. It has been found that those who are high in self-efficacy learn more which leads to higher job performance.

Social cognitive theory explains that employees use five basic capabilities to self influence themselves in order to initiate, regulate and sustain their behavior: symbolizing, forethought, observational, self-regulatory and self reflective.

According to one study, the study presents a new questionnaire called Work Agentic Capabilities (WAC) that measures the four agentic capabilities in the organizational context: forethought, self-regulation, self-reflection, and vicarious capability. The WAC questionnaire was validated through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and it was found to be positively correlated with psychological capital, positive job attitudes, proactive organizational behaviors, perceived job performance, and promotion prospects. The study concludes that the WAC questionnaire can reliably measure agentic capabilities and can be useful in understanding the sociodemographic and organizational differences in mean values of agentic capabilities.

Thought patterns and responses

Self-efficacy has several effects on thought patterns and responses:

• Low self-efficacy can lead people to believe tasks to be harder than they actually are, while high self-efficacy can lead people to believe tasks to be easier than they are. This often results in poor task planning, as well as increased stress.
• People become erratic and unpredictable when engaging in a task in which they have low self-efficacy.
• People with high self-efficacy tend to take a wider view of a task in order to determine the best plan.
• Obstacles often stimulate people with high self-efficacy to greater efforts, where someone with low self-efficacy will tend toward discouragement and giving up.
• A person with high self-efficacy will attribute failure to external factors, where a person with low self-efficacy will blame low ability. For example, someone with high self-efficacy in regards to mathematics may attribute a poor test grade to a harder-than-usual test, illness, lack of effort, or insufficient preparation. A person with a low self-efficacy will attribute the result to poor mathematical ability.

Health behaviors

A number of studies on the adoption of health practices have measured self-efficacy to assess its potential to initiate behavior change. With increased self-efficacy, individuals have greater confidence in their ability and thus are more likely to engage in healthy behaviors. Greater engagement in healthy behaviors, result in positive patient health outcomes such as improved quality of life. Choices affecting health (such as smoking, physical exercise, dieting, condom use, dental hygiene, seat belt use, and breast self-examination) are dependent on self-efficacy. Self-efficacy beliefs are cognitions that determine whether health behavior change will be initiated, how much effort will be expended, and how long it will be sustained in the face of obstacles and failures. Self-efficacy influences how high people set their health goals (e.g., "I intend to reduce my smoking", or "I intend to quit smoking altogether").

Relationship to locus of control

Further information: Locus of control

Bandura showed that difference in self-efficacy correlates to fundamentally different world views. People with high self-efficacy generally believe that they are in control of their own lives, that their own actions and decisions shape their lives, while people with low self-efficacy may see their lives as outside their control. For example, a student with high self-efficacy who does poorly on an exam will likely attribute the failure to the fact that they did not study enough. However, a student with low self-efficacy who does poorly on an exam is likely to believe the cause of that failure was due to the test being too difficult or challenging, which the student does not control.

Factors affecting self-efficacy

Bandura identifies four factors affecting self-efficacy.

1. Experience, or "enactive attainment" – The experience of mastery is the most important factor determining a person's self-efficacy. Success raises self-efficacy, while failure lowers it. According to psychologist Erik Erikson: "Children cannot be fooled by empty praise and condescending encouragement. They may have to accept artificial bolstering of their self-esteem in lieu of something better, but what I call their accruing ego identity gains real strength only from wholehearted and consistent recognition of real accomplishment, that is, achievement that has meaning in their culture."
2. Modeling, or "vicarious experience" – Modeling is experienced as, "If they can do it, I can do it as well". When we see someone succeeding, our own self-efficacy increases; where we see people failing, our self-efficacy decreases. This process is most effectual when we see ourselves as similar to the model. Although not as influential as direct experience, modeling is particularly useful for people who are particularly unsure of themselves.
3. Social persuasion – Social persuasion generally manifests as direct encouragement or discouragement from another person. Discouragement is generally more effective at decreasing a person's self-efficacy than encouragement is at increasing it.
4. Physiological factors – In stressful situations, people commonly exhibit signs of distress: shakes, aches and pains, fatigue, fear, nausea, etc. Perceptions of these responses in oneself can markedly alter self-efficacy. Getting "butterflies in the stomach" before public speaking will be interpreted by someone with low self-efficacy as a sign of inability, thus decreasing self-efficacy further, where high self-efficacy would lead to interpreting such physiological signs as normal and unrelated to ability. It is one's belief in the implications of physiological response that alters self-efficacy, rather than the physiological response itself.

Genetic and environmental determinants

In a Norwegian twin study, the heritability of self-efficacy in adolescents was estimated at 75 percent. The remaining variance, 25 percent, was due to environmental influences not shared between family members. The shared family environment did not contribute to individual differences in self-efficacy. The twins reared-together design may overestimate the effect of genetic influences and underestimate shared environmental influences because variables measured on the family level are modeled to be equal for both twins and thus cannot be separated into genetic and environmental components. Employing an alternative design, namely that of adoptive siblings, Buchanan et al. found significant shared environmental effects.

Self-efficacy was also found to be influenced by environmental factors like cultural context, home environment and educational environment. For example, parents provide their children with sets of aspirations, role models and expectations, and form beliefs about their children's abilities. Parents' beliefs are communicated to their children and affect the children's own ability beliefs. The classroom environment can also influence the students' self-efficacy through the amount and type of teacher attention, social comparisons, the tasks, the grading system and more. These are often influenced by school environment, including its culture and its educational philosophy. Studies showed that school environment influences the way the four sources of self-efficacy shape students' academic self-efficacy. For example, in different school systems - Democratic schools, Waldorf schools and mainstream public schools - there were differences in the way academic self-efficacy changed along grade levels, as well as variations in the roles of the various sources of self-efficacy. Both parental and educational environments are embedded in wider cultural contexts which influence the way self-efficacy is formed. For example, the mathematics self-efficacy of students from collectivist cultures was found to be more influenced by vicarious experiences and social persuasions than self-efficacy of students from individualist cultures.

Theoretical models of behavior

A theoretical model of the effect of self-efficacy on transgressive behavior was developed and verified in research with school children.

Prosociality and moral disengagement

Prosocial behavior (such as helping others, sharing, and being kind and cooperative) and moral disengagement (manifesting in behaviors such as making excuses for bad behavior, avoiding responsibility for consequences, and blaming the victim) are negatively correlated. Academic, social, and self-regulatory self-efficacy encourages prosocial behavior, and thus helps prevent moral disengagement.

Over-efficaciousness in learning

In low-performing students, self-efficacy is not a self-fulfilling prophecy. Over-efficaciousness or 'illusional' efficacy discourages the critical examination of one's practices, therefore inhibiting professional learning. One study, which included 101 lower-division Portuguese students at U.T. Austin, examined the foreign students' beliefs about learning, goal attainment, and motivation to continue with language study. It was concluded that over-efficaciousness negatively affected student motivation, so that students who believed they were "good at languages" had less motivation to study.

Health behavior change

Social-cognitive models of health behavior change cast self-efficacy as predictor, mediator, or moderator. As a predictor, self-efficacy is supposed to facilitate the forming of behavioral intentions, the development of action plans, and the initiation of action. As mediator, self-efficacy can help prevent relapse to unhealthy behavior. As a moderator, self-efficacy can support the translation of intentions into action. See Health action process approach.

Possible applications

Academic contexts

Parents' sense of academic efficacy for their child is linked to their children's scholastic achievement. If the parents have higher perceived academic capabilities and aspirations for their child, the child itself will share those same beliefs. This promotes academic self-efficacy for the child, and in turn, leads to scholastic achievement. It also leads to prosocial behavior, and reduces vulnerability to feelings of futility and depression. There is a relationship between low self-efficacy and depression.

In a study, the majority of a group of students questioned felt they had a difficulty with listening in class situations. Instructors then helped strengthen their listening skills by making them aware about how the use of different strategies could produce better outcomes. This way, their levels of self-efficacy were improved as they continued to figure out what strategies worked for them.

STEM

Self-efficacy has proven especially useful for helping undergraduate students to gain insights into their career development in STEM fields. Researchers have reported that mathematics self-efficacy is more predictive of mathematics interest, choice of math-related courses, and math majors than past achievements in math or outcome expectations.

Self-efficacy theory has been applied to the career area to examine why women are underrepresented in male-dominated STEM fields such as mathematics, engineering, and science. It was found that gender differences in self-efficacy expectancies importantly influence the career-related behaviors and career choices of young women.

Technical self-efficacy was found to be a crucial factor for teaching computer programming to school students, as students with higher levels of technological self-efficacy achieve higher learning outcomes. The effect of technical self-efficacy was found to be even stronger than the effect of gender.

Writing

Writing studies research indicates a strong relationship linking perceived self-efficacy to motivation and performance outcomes. Students' academic accomplishments are inextricably connected to their self-thought of efficacy and constructed motivation within their contexts. The resilient efforts that highly self-efficacious individuals exert usually enable them to face the challenge and produce high-performance achievements. Besides, individuals place more value on the academic activities which they used to achieve success  Recent writing research accentuated this connection between writers' self-efficacy, motivation and efforts offered, and achieving success in writing. In another way, writers with a high level of confidence in their writing capabilities and processes are more willing to work persistently for satisfying and effective writing. In contrast, those who have less sense of efficacy are unable to resist any failure and tend to avoid what they believe it as a painful experience_ writing. There is a causal relationship between self-efficacy beliefs that the writers hold and the accomplishments that they can achieve in their writing. Accordingly, scholars emphasized that writing self-efficacy beliefs are instrumental for making predictions of crafting outcomes.

Empirically speaking, there is a study on introductory Composition courses that proved that poor writing is strongly sponsored by the writers' self-doubts of making effective writing rather than their actual writing capabilities. Self-referent thought is a powerful mediator that links one's knowledge and actions. Therefore, even when individuals have the required skills and knowledge, their self-referent may continue in hindering their optimal performance. A 1997 study looked at how self-efficacy could influence the writing ability of 5th graders in the United States. Researchers found that there was a direct correlation between students' self-efficacy and their own writing apprehension, essay performance, and perceived usefulness of writing. As the researchers suggest, this study is important because it showed how important it is for teachers to teach skills and also to build confidence in their students. A more recent study was done that seemed to replicate the findings of the previous study quite nicely. This study found that students' beliefs about their own writing did have an impact on their self-efficacy, apprehension, and performance. This is also evident in a different study on collegiate students that reported the change of knowledge seeking as an outcome of their self-efficacy promotion. Thus, students' self-efficacy is predictive of students' production of effective writing. Therefore, increasing their writing positive beliefs resulted in better performance in their writing. Nurturing the participants' perceived self-efficacy elevated the goals that they used to set up in the writing courses, and this, in turn, promoted their quality of writing and placed more sense of self-satisfaction. Self-regulatory writing is another key determinant associated with writing efficacy and has great influence on writing development. Self-regulation encapsulates the writing dynamism of complexities, time structure, strategies, and whether deficiencies or capabilities. Through self-regulatory efficacy, writers strive toward more self-efficaciousness that effectively impacts their writing attainments.

Motivation

One of the factors most commonly associated with self-efficacy in writing studies is motivation. Motivation is often divided into two categories: extrinsic and intrinsic. McLeod suggests that intrinsic motivators tend to be more effective than extrinsic motivators because students then perceive the given task as inherently valuable. Additionally, McCarthy, Meier, and Rinderer explain that writers who are intrinsically motivated tend to be more self-directed, take active control of their writing, and see themselves as more capable of setting and accomplishing goals. Furthermore, writing studies research indicates that self-efficacy influences student choices, effort, persistence, perseverance, thought patterns, and emotional reactions when completing a writing assignment. Students with a high self-efficacy are more likely to attempt and persist in unfamiliar writing tasks.

Performance outcomes

Self-efficacy has often been linked to students' writing performance outcomes. More so than any other element within the cognitive-affective domain, self-efficacy beliefs have proven to be predictive of performance outcomes in writing. In order to assess the relationship between self-efficacy and writing capabilities, several studies have constructed scales to measure students' self-efficacy beliefs. The results of these scales are then compared to student writing samples. The studies included other variables, such as writing anxiety, grade goals, depth of processing, and expected outcomes. However, self-efficacy was the only variable that was a statistically significant predictor of writing performance.

Public speaking

A strong negative relationship has been suggested between levels of speech anxiety and self-efficacy.

Healthcare

As the focus of healthcare continues to transition from the medical model to health promotion and preventive healthcare, the role of self-efficacy as a potent influence on health behavior and self-care has come under review. According to Luszczynska and Schwarzer, self-efficacy plays a role in influencing the adoption, initiation, and maintenance of healthy behaviors, as well as curbing unhealthy practices.

Healthcare providers can integrate self-efficacy interventions into patient education. One method is to provide examples of other people acting on a health promotion behavior and then work with the patient to encourage their belief in their own ability to change. Furthermore, when nurses followed-up by telephone after hospital discharge, individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) were found to have increased self-efficacy in managing breathing difficulties. In this study, the nurses helped reinforce education and reassured patients regarding their self-care management techniques while in their home environment.

Other contexts

At the National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology in Taiwan, researchers investigated the correlations between general Internet self-efficacy (GISE), Web-specific self-efficacy (WSE), and e-service usage. Researchers concluded that GISE directly affects the WSE of a consumer, which in turn shows a strong correlation with e-service usage. These findings are significant for future consumer targeting and marketing.

Furthermore, self-efficacy has been included as one of the four factors of core self-evaluation, one's fundamental appraisal of oneself, along with locus of control, neuroticism, and self-esteem. Core self-evaluation has shown to predict job satisfaction and job performance.

Researchers have also examined self-efficacy in the context of the work–life interface. Chan et al. (2016) developed and validated a measure "self-efficacy to regulate work and life" and defined it as "the belief one has in one's own ability to achieve a balance between work and non-work responsibilities, and to persist and cope with challenges posed by work and non-work demands" (p. 1758). Specifically, Chan et al. (2016) found that "self-efficacy to regulate work and life" helped to explain the relationship between work–family enrichment, work–life balance, and job satisfaction and family satisfaction. Chan et al. (2017) also found that "self-efficacy to regulate work and life" assists individuals to achieve work–life balance and work engagement despite the presence of family and work demands.

Subclassifications

While self-efficacy is sometimes measured as a whole, as with the General Self-Efficacy Scale, it is also measured in particular functional situations.

Social self-efficacy

Social self-efficacy has been variably defined and measured. According to Smith and Betz, social self-efficacy is "an individual's confidence in her/his ability to engage in the social interactional tasks necessary to initiate and maintain interpersonal relationships." They measured social self-efficacy using an instrument of their own devise called the Scale of Perceived Social Self-Efficacy, which measured six domains: (1) making friends, (2) pursuing romantic relationships, (3) social assertiveness, (4) performance in public situations, (5) groups or parties, and (6) giving or receiving help. More recently, it has been suggested that social self-efficacy can also be operationalised in terms of cognitive (confidence in knowing what to do in social situations) and behavioral (confidence in performing in social situations) social self-efficacy.

Matsushima and Shiomi measured self-efficacy by focusing on self-confidence about social skill in personal relationship, trust in friends, and trust by friends.

Researchers suggest that social self-efficacy is strongly correlated with shyness and social anxiety.

Academic self-efficacy

Academic self-efficacy refers to the belief that one can successfully engage in and complete course-specific academic tasks, such as accomplishing course aims, satisfactorily completing assignments, achieving a passing grade, and meeting the requirements to continue to pursue one's major course of study.^[78] Various empirical inquiries have been aimed at measuring academic self-efficacy.

Positive academic emotions, such as pride, enthusiasm, and enjoyment, are likely to be influenced by the level of self-efficacy an individual holds. This is because self-efficacy has been linked to an individual's belief in their ability to successfully complete tasks. Therefore, as an individual's self-efficacy increases, they may be more likely to experience positive academic emotions.

Eating self-efficacy

Eating self-efficacy refers to an individual's perceived belief that they can resist the impulse to eat.

Other

Other areas of self-efficacy that have been identified for study include teacher self-efficacy and technological self-efficacy.

Clarifications and distinctions

Self-efficacy versus Efficacy

Unlike efficacy, which is the power to produce an effect—in essence, competence—the term self-efficacy is used, by convention, to refer to the belief (accurate or not) that one has the power to produce that effect by completing a given task or activity related to that competency. Self-efficacy is the belief in one's efficacy.

Self-efficacy versus Self-esteem

Self-efficacy is the perception of one's own ability to reach a goal; self-esteem is the sense of self-worth. For example, a person who is a terrible rock climber would probably have poor self-efficacy with regard to rock climbing, but this will not affect self-esteem if the person does not rely on rock climbing to determine self-worth. On the other hand, one might have enormous confidence with regard to rock climbing, yet set such a high standard, and base enough of self-worth on rock-climbing skill, that self-esteem is low. Someone who has high self-efficacy in general but is poor at rock climbing might have misplaced confidence, or believe that improvement is possible.

Self-efficacy versus Confidence

Canadian-American psychologist Albert Bandura describes the difference between self-efficacy and confidence as such:

the construct of self-efficacy differs from the colloquial term 'confidence.' Confidence is a nonspecific term that refers to strength of belief but does not necessarily specify what the certainty is about. I can be supremely confident that I will fail at an endeavor. Perceived self-efficacy refers to belief in one's agentive capabilities, that one can produce given levels of attainment. A self-efficacy belief, therefore, includes both an affirmation of a capability level and the strength of that belief.

Self-efficacy versus Self-concept

Self-efficacy comprises beliefs of personal capability to perform specific actions. Self-concept is measured more generally and includes the evaluation of such competence and the feelings of self-worth associated with the behaviors in question. In an academic situation, a student's confidence in their ability to write an essay is self-efficacy. Self-concept, on the other hand, could be how a student's level of intelligence affects their beliefs regarding their worth as a person.

Self-efficacy as part of core self-evaluations

Timothy A. Judge et al. (2002) has argued that the concepts of locus of control, neuroticism, generalized self-efficacy (which differs from Bandura's theory of self-efficacy) and self-esteem are so strongly correlated and exhibit such a high degree of theoretical overlap that they are actually aspects of the same higher order construct, which he calls core self-evaluations.