Self-fulfilling prophecy and Pygmalion effect in our daily life.
People have different perceptions, and these perceptions are driven by many factors such as by context, by previous experience, and by our tendency to seek out evidence that confirms our expectations.
But talking about social perceptions and social expectations affect more than the person who holds them. They can also affect the person about whom the expectations are held. Not only that, in some cases, our predictions and our expectations can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. So what is a self-fulfilling prophecy?
“The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation, evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true [thereby perpetuating] a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events, as proof [of being] right from the beginning. Such are the perversities of social logic.” — Robert Merton
Self-fulfilling prophecy is a misconception, but it’s a misconception that later becomes true.
Let’s take the example of Self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is taken from the book-length study published in 1968 by psychologist Robert Rosenthal and school principal Lenore Jacobson.
In the experiment, grade school teachers were given diagnostic information indicating that roughly 1 out of every 5 students would “bloom” academically in the coming year. And, later eight months the intelligence tests were taken and measured the result, these students did improve more than other students. What makes the study interesting is that these academic bloomers were selected at random. The diagnostic information teachers were given had been assigned using a table of random numbers.
Apparently, when teachers were told that certain randomly selected students would do well, they gave these students more attention and more praise than they gave the other students, and as a result, these students actually improved more than the other students did. Their IQ scores increased within eight months — not all students, and not by a huge amount, but for first and second-grade students, the increase was statistically significant, meaning that the difference probably wasn’t by chance alone.
Rosenthal and Jacobson called this phenomenon the “Pygmalion effect” after the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion, in which Professor Higgins turns an uneducated “flower girl” into a lady by teaching her to dress and speak in such a way that people expect her to be a lady.
“Pygmalion effect” has been replicated in all sorts of settings, from elementary schools to high schools, to universities, job settings, and although there are plenty of exceptions and the effect isn’t always strong, there’s no doubt that self-fulfilling prophecies do take place.
Conclusion
These studies suggest not only expectations of teachers can influence student performance, but also student expectations about teachers can have an effect. One other hand, self-fulfilling prophecies in daily life is that their eventual truth can make it very hard to distinguish them from regular prophecies.
