Chapter 5. The Extraordinary Power of Expectancies to Bias Perception, Memory, and Information-Seeking.

Abstract

Expectations can be self-confirming, not only because they create self-fulfilling prophecies, but becaue they may influence, bias, and distort how people interpret, evaluate, judge, remember, and explain others behaviors and characteristics.  This chapter discusses some of the early research that most dramatically demonstrated this phenomenon.  It reviews classic research demonstrating how race, gender, social class, occupational, and sexuality stereotypes bias person perception and how psychopathological labels (e.g., “schizophrenic”) so distort professionals’ judgments as to render the sane indistinguishable from the insane.  It reviews two studies showing that beliefs about personality characteristics bias judgment and memory; and another showing that teachers’ expectations bias the grades they give to students.  Last, this chapter reviews research demonstrating that expectations even bias how people gather information in expectancy-confirming ways.  Taken together, this chapter, especially when combined with Chapter 4, conveys why the great enthusiasm social psychology once had for expectancy-confirming phenomena often led scholars to conclude that the biases and self-fulfilling prophecies created by interpersonal expectations constituted major ways in which people created and constructed social reality.

EXCERPT:
    Self-fulfilling prophecies, stereotypes, memory biases — one expectancy effect after another, and just when you thought there could not possibly be any more expectancy effects, there were attributional biases, teacher expectations biasing grades, and information-gathering biases.  The extent to which expectations influence, change, and color (or, in the case of stereotypes, taint) our interactions with and perceptions of other people seemed to be nothing short of stunning.  They pervasively color first impressions.  They influence how we see other people; what we remember about them; how we explain their behaviors; and how we go about trying to figure other people out (not to mention changing how other people see themselves and actually behave).
The social psychological enthusiasm for expectancy-induced biases was at least comparable to, and perhaps exceeded, that expressed for self-fulfilling prophecies…
If I have done my job well in writing Chapters 4 and 5, you now have some insight into why enthusiasm for these effects once pervaded not only social psychology, but much of the social sciences. And, for the most part, still does (e.g., Jost & Kruglanski, 2002; Ross et al, 2010; Weinstein et al, 2004)…  In short, the extraordinary emphasis on the power of expectations to create social reality that characterized the early reviews has become part of the distilled wisdom of social psychology….

Were Those Conclusions Justified?
“Well,” you may be wondering, “just because they emphasized the power and pervasiveness of expectancy effects does not necessarily mean that they over-emphasized such effects.  Perhaps their perspectives were simply true to the data!”  Especially given the enthusiasm with which the research on expectancies was usually described, an enthusiasm I tried to recapture in Chapters 4 and 5, such a question is clearly warranted.  If I emphasize how cold and snowy it is in Alaska, or how hot and wet it is in the Amazon, I am simply accurately and fairly describing an existing state of affairs.  Perhaps the same can be said for the early conclusions regarding expectancies.
Whether such conclusions are valid, however, requires not merely an evangelical promotion of the early research — it requires a thorough and careful critical evaluation of that research.  So, although it is clear that nearly all social psychological perspectives on expectancies during this first blush of research emphasized their inaccuracy, and the power and pervasiveness of their effects, what remains unclear is whether such emphases were justified.