18.6: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

A self-fulfilling prophecy is the tendency for a person’s expectations about the future to influence that future in a way that makes the expectations come true. Sometimes we have expectations, most often about other people, that lead us, unwittingly, to treat them in a certain way. And treating them in this way may in fact lead them to behave in the way that we thought they would.

For example, if you hear that Wilbur is hostile before you ever meet him, you may be more likely to be hostile when you do meet him (“He’s hostile, so I’d better beat him to the punch”). And this may lead him to react with hostility, even though he would have been friendly if you’d been friendly yourself. Your prediction leads you to act in a way that makes the prediction come true.

The psychologist Robert Rosenthal and his coworkers have studied selffulfilling prophecies extensively. In a famous study in 1968, Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson told grade schoolteachers at the beginning of the school year that their incoming students had just been given a battery of tests. Twenty percent of these students, it was explained, had great potential and should be expected to blossom academically in the coming year. In fact, the students in this group were selected randomly. Nevertheless, these twenty percent ended up improving more than the other students. What happened?

The chances of randomly picking the twenty percent that would improve are extremely small. Hence, the explanation is that teachers’ expectations influenced their students’ performances. Teachers expected the students in the targeted group to blossom, which led them to act in ways that encouraged the students to do so. For example, teachers gave the students in the high-potential group more time, more and better feedback, and more encouragement.

In short, the teachers’ expectations led them to behave in ways that made their expectations come true. This sort of self-fulfilling prophecy is sometimes called the Pygmalion effect, after the play Pygmalion, in which a professor of linguistics transforms a young woman with little education and bad grammar into a sophisticated, well-spoken person. Countless studies since have shown that this effect is very real (though often it is of modest size), both in the classroom and in other settings.

Stereotypes can also serve as self-fulfilling prophecies. If teachers expect students from some groups to perform better than others, this may lead them to treat their students in ways that will make these expectations come true. In a society where people think that women are incapable of performing a demanding job like being a doctor, young girls are likely to be treated in a way that suggests they can’t do such work. Furthermore, any interest they may display in medicine will be discouraged, and they will be encouraged to adopt quite different roles, like being a housewife. Years of such treatment will make it much more difficult for a woman to become a doctor. So, the prediction that they can’t be doctors can lead people to treat them in ways that will make the prediction come true.