Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Definition

A self-fulfilling prophecy is a process through which someone's expectations about a situation or another person leads to the fulfillment of those expectations. Thus, the expectancy becomes a cause, so that what is expected comes true because it was expected. The process includes three steps: (1) A perceiver forms an expectation of a situation or target person, (2) the perceiver's expectations affects how he or she behaves in the situation or treats the target person, and (3) the situation or the target person is affected by the perceiver's behavior in a way that confirms the perceiver's initial expectation.

Background and History

The concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy was initially introduced by a sociologist, Robert K. Merton. In Merton's conception, a self-fulfilling prophecy applied to social as well as nonsocial phenomena. For example, Merton discusses how a self-fulfilling prophecy could lead a stable bank to experience failure. Imagine that a group of individuals comes to believe that a bank is on the verge of bankruptcy. As a result, those individuals withdraw their savings from the bank. In turn, other depositors start to worry that their funds are not safe and consequently withdraw their funds. In the end, many depositors withdrawing their funds actually leads to the bank becoming bankrupt. Therefore, the individuals' expectations influenced their own behavior and ultimately the very situation about which they were concerned. The type of self-fulfilling prophecy that leads to a bank failure is one that depends on the beliefs and actions of many individuals. However, most of the social psychological research on self-fulfilling prophecies has focused on how one person's belief about another person leads to confirmation of that belief.

One of the best-known studies that demonstrates the effect of self-fulfilling prophecies at the interpersonal level was conducted by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson in the late 1960s. In this study, the researchers led classroom teachers to believe that some of their students were “potential bloomers,” who would show substantial IQ gains during the school year. In actuality, the students labeled as “bloomers” were randomly chosen by the researchers and were not really different from their classmates. So the teachers' beliefs about the potential bloomers were initially false. Nonetheless, at the end of the school year, these bloomers had higher gains in their IQ compared with the other students. The teachers' expectations that bloomers would experience IQ gains caused them to treat these students differently. For example, teachers were more likely to give feedback to the bloomers and challenge them more than they did their other students. These differences in the teachers' behavior led these students to perform better. This study was important in demonstrating that individuals may unwittingly cause outcomes that they expect by changing their own behavior and thereby influencing the behavior of others.

The early research on the self-fulfilling nature of teacher expectations on student achievement faced criticism about the ethics of the research and the very existence of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Experimental laboratory research, however, convincingly demonstrated that people can subtly affect the behavior of others because of their own expectations and that these self-fulfilling prophecies do occur in many situations. The experimental studies on self-fulfilling prophecies typically led perceivers to expect something of a target and then measured the target's behavior. Because the expectations perceivers held for the targets were initially false, if the behavior of the target confirmed the expectation, this was taken as evidence of a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, perceivers might be led to believe that a target person with whom they would interact was physically attractive by showing the perceiver a picture of an attractive person. Because people tend to believe that physically attractive individuals are friendly and outgoing, perceivers would expect an attractive interaction partner to be sociable. Perceivers would then interact with someone who was objectively physically attractive or not. In general, perceivers acted in ways that elicited the type of behavior they expected from their interaction partners. So, for example, perceivers were themselves more friendly and outgoing if they believed that they were interacting with an attractive person rather than if they thought they were interacting with an unattractive person. In turn, targets who experienced friendliness from the perceiver responded by [Page 829]being warm and friendly, regardless of their objective levels of physical attractiveness. These types of laboratory studies were important in demonstrating that selffulfilling prophecies do occur, even in situations in which people do not know each other very well or have repeated contact, as a teacher might have with students. Recent research has even demonstrated that perceivers' expectations may lead to self-fulfilling prophecies even when perceivers are unaware or not consciously thinking of their beliefs. Something in the environment may bring to mind a perceiver's expectation, and even if the perceiver is not actively thinking about the belief, it might influence his or her behavior, and the behavior of individuals with whom they interact, leading to selffulfilling prophecies.

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