Search Results

This chapter is framed around reviewing the scientific and empirical literature that has addressed three questions regarding teacher expectations: How powerful are expectancy effects in the classroom? How accurate is the typical teacher expectation? Have any conditions been identified under which truly powerful self-fulfilling prophecies do occur? The results regarding the first two questions are vividly clear because they have been so well established by so many studies: Expectancy effects in the classroom exist but are generally weak, fragile, and fleeting, and teacher expectations predict student achievement primarily because those expectations are accurate. A far more limited body of scientific research has addressed the third question, so that conclusions regarding conditions under which powerful self-fulfilling prophecies occur must be held more tentatively. Nonetheless, unusually large self-fulfilling prophecies have been found among students suffering from some sort of stigma (race, class, low achievement). Whether self-fulfilling prophecies primarily help or harm students, however, is currently unclear from the existing literature, with my own research finding helpful self-fulfilling prophecy effects among the largest yet found, but several other studies finding more evidence of harmful than of helpful self-fulfilling prophecies.

This chapter is the first of four that critically evaluates the conclusion that the biases and self-fulfilling prophecies created by interpersonal expectations constitute major ways in which people create and construct social reality. This chapter specifically argues that there is abundant evidence from the real world that strongly suggests such effects, though real and occasionally powerful, are, in fact, most of the time weak, fragile, and fleeting. Furthermore, it shows that even the early and classic work demonstrating self-fulfilling prophecies provided no evidence that such effects were either powerful or pervasive.

This chapter reviews theory and data regarding the accumulation of self-fulfilling prophecies over time and across perceivers. The theoretical case for powerfully accumulating self-fulfilling prophecies (described in depth here) often seems so obvious and compelling that data are not even needed to test it—until the theoretical case for dissipating self-fulfilling prophecies is described in similar depth. Given that these opposite claims appear highly compelling, whether self-fulfilling prophecies accumulate or dissipate can only be resolved by data, not by theoretical analysis. In classrooms, the data are vividly clear: Self-fulfilling prophecies do not accumulate over time. Instead, they dissipate. Concurrent accumulation (across perceivers) in classrooms most likely does occur. This chapter shows why, perhaps surprisingly, the generally highly limited self-fulfilling prophecy effects found in existing research likely constitute an upper limit of how much concurrent accumulation actually happens. The handful of studies assessing accumulation outside of classrooms have yielded suggestive but inconsistent results from which no broad and general conclusions can yet be reached. Although one can tell a compelling story about how the accumulation of self-fulfilling prophecy upon self-fulfilling prophecy constitutes a major mechanism by which social stereotypes confirm themselves and maintain unjustified systems of oppression and status, there is, in fact, currently no clear evidence supporting such an analysis, and a great deal of evidence against it.

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 trainees’ 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.

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—research that often shows that strong motivations to self-verify seem to greatly reduce self-fulfilling prophecies and self-verification is often at least as strong or stronger than self-fulfilling prophecy. Self-verification clearly constitutes one social psychological process that serves to limit the power of self-fulfilling prophecies and expectancy-confirming biases.

This chapter reviews the earliest empirical research demonstrating that false beliefs sometimes create their own realities through self-fulfilling prophecies. First, it reviews the earliest work on “experimenter effects”—a phenomenon whereby researchers sometimes bias the results of their own research in such a manner as to lead to confirmation of their own hypotheses. Second, it reviews and critically evaluates one of the influential and controversial studies in all of psychology: Rosenthal and Jacobson’s (1968) Pygmalion in the Classroom study, which showed that teachers’ expectations could lead to educational self-fulfilling prophecies. I conclude that figuring out what justifiable conclusions can be reached on the basis of this study is almost impossible but that, even taking its results at face value, it found weak, fragile, and fleeting self-fulfilling prophecies, rather than the powerful and pervasive ones it has often been cited as showing. Third, this chapter reviews the immediate follow-up research to this controversial study. That work clearly showed that self-fulfilling prophecies do indeed occur (even this claim was controversial at one time); they are generally small, fragile, and fleeting (exactly as found—but not often described as such—in the original Pygmalion study); and the most controversial claim emerging from Pygmalion—that teacher expectations can alter student IQ—is, at best, weakly established.

This chapter reviews interesting and important research on self-fulfilling prophecies, expectancy biases, and accuracy that did not fit elsewhere in this book. With respect to self-fulfilling prophecies, this chapter reviews evidence on processes and moderators, stereotype threat, stereotype priming, and rejection sensitivity. With respect to bias, this chapter reviews recent research on race bias in jury selection and, more generally, implores my fellow social psychologists to begin developing some standards for evaluating the true power and extent of bias (e.g., by articulating a model of rationality and assessing both how much people deviate from it and how close they come to it). With respect to accuracy, research on empathic accuracy and accuracy from thin slices of behavior is reviewed.

This chapter captures many of the themes of this book by first summarizing a “story” common throughout the social sciences. It is a story that emphasizes the role of stereotypes, social beliefs, and interpersonal expectancies in perpetuating and exacerbating demographic inequalities. It points out that, although the scientific evidence does not support it, this “story” remains highly popular among social scientists for two main reasons: Social psychology’s bias in favor of bias leads to a scientific literature filled with biases, not because laypeople’s judgments are so heavily dominated by biases, but because social psychologists seem to so strongly prefer to study bias; and the story has great political appeal as a rhetorical tool in the fight against oppression. This chapter then distinguishes between moral/religious/philosophical/political beliefs, which are rarely capable of being subjected to empirical test and disconfirmation, and scientific beliefs, which are subject to empirical test and disconfirmation. If one’s belief that stereotypes are inaccurate or that self-fulfilling prophecies are powerful and pervasive can be disconfirmed by overwhelming evidence of stereotype accuracy or evidence of weak, fragile, and fleeting self-fulfilling prophecies, then one’s beliefs are scientific. If those beliefs cannot be disconfirmed, they are not scientific, and one should not pretend that they are. The chapter ends with an analysis of the presidential election of 2008, showing that anti-Black racism seemed to play the minimal role in the election that would be predicted by the general perspective taken throughout this book. Bias was real, but small. It is about time that the social sciences started acknowledging that, with respect to social beliefs, social perception, and social reality, the big picture is that the social perception glass (of people judging others) is about 90% full.

This chapter reviews some of the earliest research relating social perception to social reality. This includes some of the earliest (and classic) studies of stereotypes, the “New Look” in perception movement of the 1940s and 1950s, and some of the early classics of social perception research. Much of this work was interpreted by the original authors as demonstrating widespread flaws and biases in social judgment and is routinely interpreted in much the same manner by modern scholars. Nonetheless, this chapter shows that, in general, this early work either failed to demonstrate inaccuracy or provided far more evidence of accuracy than of error or bias.

This chapter begins with a section on social constructs called models. Models simplify situations by embodying relationships involved in some transparent manner that makes the phenomenon that is taking place more recognizable, and encourages the right sort of questions to be asked. The first model presented is the thermostat, which models cyclical behavior, and has characteristics of lag time and accumulated inventory. A well-known model is that of the self-fulfilling prophecy, where expectations sometimes induce behavior that causes the expectation to be fulfilled. Schelling's variations on this model that are considered are the “self-displacing prophecy” and “self-negating prophecy.” The concept of “lemons” is examined. This is Akerloff's model based on asymmetrical information, and the “lemon” is a poor quality used car. Lemons will be offered on the market, while good quality used cars will not, and the seller knows what he has. Markets can be destroyed. This is the reason why there are copyright and patent laws. Examples are given for all the models. The chapter includes a supplement—a 1991 homework assignment describing a lemon situation, followed by an e-mail, sent eighteen years later, when the same student was traveling through Vietnam, and discovered an identical situation that actually existed, but with dragon fruit.

This chapter has a wide focus, covering many of the cognitive problems that are secondary to chronic organizational stress. Stress interferes with organizational learning, organizational memory is lost, organizational amnesia affects function, and service delivery becomes increasingly fragmented. The organization has developed learning disabilities. Decision-making becomes compromised and reactive so that short-sighted policy decisions are made that appear to compound existing problems. Stressed groups are frequently unwilling to perceive and discuss problems that the group denies and are more likely to actively and dangerously silence dissent.

There are a number of different factors that contribute to uncertainty in prognosis. This chapter looks at the science of prognosis, and the example of birth asphyxia. In practice, one substantial contributor to uncertainty in prognosis is the way in which research into prognosis has been performed and reported. Self-fulfilling prophecies are a serious problem for prognostic studies. There are a number of ways in which prognostic research studies could and should be modified. This chapter also looks at research into the quality of life of children with disability. Studies have mostly been undertaken in ways that make it hard to apply predictions of quality of life to particular patients. This may be improved in future research; however, the hardest problem is likely to remain. Those patients where assessments of quality of life are potentially the most important are also the ones where it is the most difficult.

Despite a large literature about educational expectancy effects as well as current U.S. policy focused on raising expectations in schooling, intervention research has been relatively rare. Drawing upon an ecological perspective, this chapter describes a setting-level theory about the promotion of high expectations for diverse populations of students. Four exemplars of expectancy interventions (de-tracking a high school, turning around a low-performing elementary school, creating a high-expectation elementary school, and developing an early-college secondary school for the first in the family to attend university) illustrate the levers of change. Expectancy change rests upon the capacity to see youth in a more favorable light, as capable of learning despite difference, and upon increased individual and organizational capacity to challenge and support the talent development of a diversity of students.

The description of the perceptual mechanism has so far been very passive but in fact action is heavily involved in unconscious perceptual inference. This chapter first connects perceptual inference with action via the notion of active inference. An important part of this story concerns the idea that our model of the world includes representation of ourselves. Next, however, some issues arise, concerning the notion of self-fulfilling prophecies, and how surprise is bound under a model of the world. which prompt a more involved and challenging information theoretical approach. This second part of the chapter serves to show why action is so central to our fundamental understanding of why and how we engage in prediction error minimization. This is followed by an exploration of matters arising from this prediction error minimization take on action, including the relation between belief and desire. The chapter ends on a more general note, by summarizing the prediction error minimization mechanism and commenting on why the framework presented throughout Part I of the book is attractive as well as on what challenges it confronts.

This chapter considers the degree to which the processes of neighborhood change and the outcomes they yield are socially desirable. It investigates whether the primarily market-driven processes that neighborhoods undergo as they transition between states, and the population and housing stock characteristics that neighborhoods exhibit at any moment are the best we can hope for from a society-wide perspective. Based on a theoretical analysis and review of the evidence, the chapter advances three propositions of inefficiency, inequity, and unequal opportunity. Private, market-oriented decision-makers governing resource flows among neighborhoods usually arrive at an inefficient allocation due to externalities, strategic gaming, and self-fulfilling prophecies, systematically producing too-little investment in housing and too much segregation by race and economic standing. Lower socioeconomic status, black and Hispanic households and property owners typically bear a disproportionate share of the financial and social costs associated with segregation, under-investment and neighborhood transition processes, while reaping comparatively little of their social benefits. Because neighborhood context powerfully affects children, youth, and adults—yet neighborhood contexts are very unequal across economic and racial groups—space becomes a way of perpetuating unequal opportunities for social advancement.

Michael Harris Bond and behavioral scientist, reflects on his most underappreciated work: a thesis research on the concept of social reality and the opposite of a self-fulfilling prophecy, which he termed “self-reversing prophecy.” Bond examined the possibility that we social actors develop an impression of another person for whatever reasons, then act towards that person in a way that makes his or behavior conform to our impression, rendering others consistent to our mind's eye. He proposed that it is possible to create and sustain the interpersonal reality that surrounds us. He explored these ideas within the context of “behavioral confirmation” as opposed to “behavioral disconfirmation”.

Drawing upon the Sociology of Expectations, the chapter conceptualizes industry analysts as commercial ‘promissory organizations’: prolific producers of future-oriented research. To chart their many kinds of promissory work, the chapter sets out an initial typology that characterizes Gartner’s research outputs according to differences in how they are produced, legitimated, distributed, consumed and achieve influence. This includes: infrastructural knowledge, which typically attempts to define technological field and maps the players within that arena. These classifications are institutionalized, meaning that they exert a powerful and enduring influence but are rendered invisible (‘visible only upon breakdown’); visions let loose refers to more transitory forms of intervention through a stream of provocative signposts that analysts circulate about the state and future development of the industry; and statements and their world describes the differential assessments of the capacity and potential of various suppliers within particular product markets which exercise strong but contested influence on the market.

The future is an idea about worlds to come. The world we live in is seen as more uncertain, and demand for predictions and forecasts about international politics is growing. This book explores the political and epistemic status of future claims and their effects on contemporary international politics. It also develops a normative analysis of what future claims ought to be in a democratic society. It shows the importance of going beyond the two main sociological approaches to fully understand the political nature of future claims. This includes classical sociology, which is mostly focused on the hypothesis of the self-fulfilling nature of future claims and critical theory, emphasizing the arbitrariness of the social construction of the future and its accelerating effects. This book analyzes four paradoxes that characterize predictions and forecasts in international politics. Claims about the future are linear and trace continuity between the past, the present and the future; therefore they tend not to anticipate radical junctures. There is very limited pluralism in predictions and forecasts. They can slow down some processes while they stabilize beliefs and favor inaction. Future claims help create surprises when major changes happen.

Chapter 5 examines the second path to violence in protest marches. Like the other two paths, it leads to violent clashes between protesters and police due to interactions, interpretations, and emotional dynamics that emerge between the start of the protest and violence erupting. This second path to protest violence, called the offense path, is comprised of spatial incursions, escalation signs, and property damage. Based on detailed discussions of US and German protests, the chapter argues that a self-fulfilling prophecy cannot explain the outbreak of violence but that actions during the protest can foster violence if they are interpreted as signs of immanent escalation. Such escalation signs increase tension and fear regardless of prior expectations. A further section discusses how property damage favors escalation. A last section highlights how their combination with spatial incursions and escalation signs during protests leads protesters or police to perceive an offense by the other group.

The wide array of risks facing institutions of higher learning is presented. Risk is a multi-faceted concept that can be addressed through avoidance, assumption, reduction, transfer, and sharing using a variety of institutional arrangements. A key contribution of the book is the analysis of social and psychological traps that confront decision makers in academia.