Chapter 4. The Extraordinary Power of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Abstract

  This chapter captures the enthusiasm many social psychologists had (and sometimes still have) for self-fulfilling prophecies.  It reviews many of the early classic studies, demonstrating self-fulfilling race, gender, and attractiveness stereotypes.  It also reviews studies of self-fulfilling prophecies that did not involve stereotypes: studies of self-fulfilling beliefs about competitiveness, hostility, and military trainee’s skills.  When the first blush of social psychological research on expectancies is viewed in this light, it is no wonder that self-fulfilling prophecies seemed to be a ubiquitous social phenomenon, which supposedly provided deep insights into how people socially constructed their own social realities.

EXCERPT:
Social Psychology Falls in Love with Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
Although most social psychologists avoided the intellectual battles surrounding the Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968a,b) study, Pygmalion also had a profound influence on social psychology.  Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968a,b) had raised the possibility that self-fulfilling prophecies were a widespread and common phenomenon.  And perhaps even more important, they provided a basic methodology (induction of false expectations) for experimentally testing for self-fulfilling prophecies.  Armed with this information, and with a longstanding theoretical and applied interest in stereotypes and prejudice, inspired by the evidence of the existence of self-fulfilling prophecies and by the beginnings of the “cognitive revolution” in psychology, the golden age of social psychological research on expectancy effects was about to begin.