Self-Confidence and Sports Performance

Female and male athletes often crate a relationship between their performance and their actual selfconfidence. Poor performances are explained with a lack of self-confidence and good performances with strong self-confidence. The purpose of this presentation is to elaborate the validity of these common sense explanations based on a literature review. First, we describe the postulates of self-efficacy theory (Bandura, 1977, 1986, 1997), which is the most extensively used theory for investigating the relation of selfconfidence to sport (or motor) performance. Second, we report some empirical findings and suggest some directions for future research.