Chapter 7

You Better Change Your Expectations Because
I Will Not Change (Much) to Fit Your Expectations:
Self-Verification as a Limit to Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Abstract

Self-verification constitutes one reason self-fulfilling prophecies are generally not very powerful.  Self-verification refers to the idea that people are often highly motivated to see themselves in a manner consistent with their own long-standing and deep-seated self-views. A strong self-concept, it seems, constitutes the psychological rudder that assists people in finding their own way through the potentially stormy seas of others’ expectations.  This chapter reviews the research that has often pitted self-verification against self-fulfilling prophecy – a research that often shows that: 1) Strong motivations to self-verify seem to greatly reduce self-fulfilling prophecies; and 2) Self-verification is often at least as stronger or stronger than self-fulfilling prophecy.  Self-verification clearly constitutes one social psychological processes that serves to limit the power of self-fulfilling prophecies and expectancy-confirming biases.

EXCERPT:

All this illness eventually took a toll on my school performance.  My elementary school used tracking, also known as ability grouping.  The “smartest” kids went into one class, the next group in another, and so on.  Because I had missed so much in first and second grade, they put me one class from the bottom in third grade.  But by third grade, my health began to improve…
      My fourth grade teacher, Mr. Sunshine … used within class grouping for spelling.  The best spellers were placed into the top group and had to learn how to spell difficult words — typically on a 5th-7th grade level.  The other group received 4th-5th grade words.  Coming up off the near-bottom in third grade, Mr. Sunshine naturally placed me in the lower group.  Although I liked Mr. Sunshine quite a lot, this annoyed me.  I knew I could learn those tougher words.  But Mr. Sunshine had a policy that gave me cause for hope — anyone who got three 100’s in a row on spelling tests would automatically get bumped up to the higher group.
I was sure I could do it.  My problem was … that I often make careless or thoughtless mistakes.  So I never could quite get those three 100’s in a row.  I might get a 100, then a 90, then a 95, then two 100s in a row, then another 95, and so on.  But I knew I should have been in the higher group, so every time I fell short, it made me more determined to get my three 100’s in a row.
But I never did.  Why?  Because Mr. Sunshine eventually realized that, even without three hundreds in a row, the lower group was too easy for me.  And moved me up…
Hey, what happened to self-fulfilling prophecy?  Ability grouping is often depicted as an unmitigated evil serving to create and maintain a caste-like system in which the academically rich get richer and the academically poor get poorer (e.g., J. Oakes, 1985; Rist, 1970).  If so, they should be a great mechanism for creating self-fulfilling prophecies — just relegate low expectancy kids to the low classes and put the supposedly smart kids in the top classes, and tracking will insure the fulfillment of those expectations.  I should have become a mediocre speller, right?  Somehow, though, I managed to escape the near-bottom classes.  Even so, why didn’t Mr. Sunshine’s early year low expectations fulfill themselves?  Why didn’t my spelling skills decline, or at least improve too slowly to warrant moving up?
      As I have been trying to point out throughout this book (except for Chapters 4-5), interpersonal expectations are often just not very powerful. Chapters 6-9 identify a slew of reasons why.  One such reason is self-verification.