Final answer:
Overemphasis on self-efficacy can lead to self-blame for failures, increase feelings of worthlessness, and deflect societal responsibility by misattributing personal failures to individual shortcomings. A balance between personal responsibility and external factors is essential to mitigate these downsides.
Step-by-step explanation:
While promoting self-efficacy can have numerous positive outcomes, overemphasizing it may indeed have downsides. These include (a) unfairly blaming the person for not succeeding, (b) increasing feelings of worthlessness, particularly when people legitimately can't succeed, and (c) allowing government and the wider world to define societal problems as simply the person's fault. These negative aspects point out the importance of recognizing both personal accountability and the role of external factors in outcomes.
The downside of excessive focus on self-efficacy is akin to having an overly internal locus of control, where individuals blame themselves entirely for failures, ignoring external circumstances. Such a perspective may not only lead to depression due to internal, global, and stable attributions for bad outcomes but also undermine societal responsibility for various forms of disadvantage or systemic issues. It is therefore crucial to balance the concept of self-efficacy with an understanding of situational constraints and collective responsibilities.