Definition
The judgment one has about his/her own competence to cope with certain feared animals is believed to have been an adaptive psychological mechanism that has assisted humans in their attempts to avoid serious harm (and therefore enhancing their survival chances) throughout evolutionary history. Nevertheless, such an evolved psychological mechanism is conceivably less relevant in the modern, largely urbanized and medically progressive environment whereby the risk of being severely injured by the dreaded creatures is relatively more modest.
Introduction
Self-efficacy, the perception of one’s proficiency in accomplishing tasks that are related to the achievement of a specific goal (Bandura 1977), is a concept that has garnered considerable empirical endorsement and has been successfully utilized in elucidating an extensive...
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O, J. (2018). Self-Efficacy, Animal Phobias and Evolutionary Mismatch. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1057-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1057-1
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