CONCEPT
Vicarious Learning
The second source of self-efficacy : the observation of similar others succeeding or failing at a task, which updates the observer's belief about her own capability by inference rather than direct experience.
Vicarious learning is the process by which observing another person's performance changes the observer's beliefs about her own capability. Bandura demonstrated in the Bobo doll experiments that children learn aggressive behaviors simply by watching adults perform them — a finding that shattered the behaviorist assumption that learning required direct reinforcement. Vicarious learning is weaker than mastery experience because the observer must infer that she could succeed where the model succeeded, but it becomes decisive when direct experience is unavailable or too risky. The AI discourse provides vicarious learning at unprecedented scale and distorts it through selection bias.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The power of a vicarious model depends on perceived similarity. A twelve-year-old watching Simone Biles perform a vault learns almost nothing about her own gymnastic capability, because the dissimilarity is too great to support inference. A twelve-year-old watching a classmate perform the same vault learns a great deal, because the similarity supports the inference "if she can, perhaps I