The Effects Of The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy In Your Life

What is the self-fulfilling prophecy?

According to the Britannica dictionary, the self-fulfilling prophecy is the process through which an originally false expectation leads to its own confirmation. It is when an individual’s expectations about a person result in that person acting in ways that confirm the expectation.

The self-fulfilling prophecy can be found everywhere. It can be seen in a classroom with the pygmalion effect and in ourselves. Self-fulfilling can start with a comment about an action a person does toward us or even prejudice and stereotype.

An example is that certain social groups get stereotyped as being smart, such as the Asians. This creates a need to complete the stereotype or the prophecy often pushing people to divert from their original goals.

A self-fulfilling prophecy applied to a certain ethnic group certainly tends to make itself true. In other words, a self-fulfilling prophecy is a misrepresentation of reality that does not turn out real but makes itself real. 

3 Scenarios Of The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

1. In classrooms

The Pygmalion Effect

“When we expect certain behaviors of others, we are likely to act in ways that make the expected behavior more likely to occur.”

Rosenthal & Babad

The pygmalion effect is a cycle in which our actions towards others impact their beliefs towards us. This then causes their actions toward us. This further reinforces our beliefs about ourselves and this closes the cycle by influencing our actions towards others.

This cycle can be applied to our relationships with others. Rosenthal and Babad ran experiments to see whether student achievement could be self-fulfilling, based on their teachers’ expectations.

Teachers’ expectations of certain students become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The prophecy starts when a teacher believes a student is incapable of doing certain work. The teacher then starts treating them like they lack the ability to do so. The student then proceeds to fail at the task due to the lack of support from the teacher.

The cycle then repeats because the teacher tends to point out they were right all along.

In certain social situations, a teacher’s prejudice or stereotypes towards a certain student can affect the way the student behaves in the classroom. These same stereotypes tend to systematically advantage students from advantaged backgrounds due to the different expectations they have for them.

2. The Self-Imposed Prophecy

The self-imposed prophecy is those results that we create for ourselves. It always starts with a belief we have about ourselves in the future followed by us unconsciously taking actions because we have that belief. This then results in the consequences of those actions we took based on those beliefs.

For example, let’s say that you are about to do a class presentation and the last time you did the one you forgot an important part because you didn’t study. Now you believe that you are really bad at memorizing things and at giving presentations because “you get really nervous.”

This belief makes you not properly study for your presentation and you have set yourself to believe that you get nervous, so you do and give a really bad presentation apart from forgetting the most important points

3. The Placebo Effect

In psychology and medicine, a placebo is regularly used during experiments. The control group is given a placebo that doesn’t actually contain the medicine or is given a “fake treatment.” A lot of the times the patients that were given the placebo show improvements even if they were not given the treatment or medicament. This is an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy since the patients have an expectation of what is actually going to happen that it ends up occurring. The beliefs the patient held on the treatment or the medicine made the prophecy become fulfilled.

Thoughts on the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

In the end, the self-fulfilling prophecy is something that happens naturally and is really hard to avoid. I would even say almost impossible. Our mind is so powerful that it shapes ourselves throughout the perception we have of the world and through our interactions with other people. Like in the case of the placebo, it is hard to know which effects are real and which effects we created by our certain actions or behaviors that in turn make people do actions towards us which shape us into who we are. My final thoughts on this prophecy are to be careful of what you put out there because one way or another is going to come back to you. Because other people reflect how you treat them onto you.

References

Schaedig, D (2020, Aug 24). Self-fulfilling prophecy and the pygmalion effect. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/self-fulfilling-prophecy.html