As we've seen in earlier videos, our experience of reality isn't simply a function of what's out there. Our perceptions are also influenced by context, by previous experience, and by our tendency to seek out evidence that confirms our expectations. But 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. In fact, in some cases, our predictions and our expectations can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. The term "self-fulfilling prophecy" was coined in a classic 1948 journal article by a sociologist named Robert Merton. Here's what Merton wrote: "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." What Merton is saying is that a self-fulfilling prophecy is a misconception, but it's a misconception that later becomes true. In social psychology there have been hundreds of investigations of self-fulfilling prophecies, but by far the most famous is a book-length study published in 1968 by psychologist Robert Rosenthal and school principal Lenore Jacobson. I wasn't able to get a photo of Lenore Jacobson, but here are photos of Professor Rosenthal and the school where the study was conducted. 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, as measured by intelligence tests eight months later, these students did improve more than other students. What makes the study by Rosenthal and Jacobson 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. Since 1968, the "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. In fact, studies suggest not only that teacher expectations can influence student performance, but student expectations about teachers can have an effect. One other thing to note about self-fulfilling prophecies in daily life is that their eventual truth can make it very hard to distinguish them from regular prophecies. For example, consider the case in which North Korea suspects that South Korea is aggressive, and to protect itself North Korea begins arming. South Korea perceives the armament by North Korea as aggressive, and South Korea responds by arming defensively. North Korea interprets the defensive armament by South Korea as confirmation that South Korea is, in fact, aggressive, so North Korea arms even more. This situation is known in political science as a "security dilemma," and one of the most frequently cited results of such a dilemma is World War I. Although we can never know for sure whether this was the case or not, many historians have argued that World War I was caused in part by misperceptions of aggression—mistaken expectations that ultimately proved true. What's interesting is that without a control group in which, say, North Korea doesn't begin by expecting South Korea to arm (and of course, life doesn't come with a control group), we can never be absolutely sure whether North Korea's prophecy was self-fulfilling or simply prophetic. It's always possible that a country arms as an act of aggression, but it's also possible that the country would never have armed if it weren't expected to be aggressive. The only way to know for sure would be to see whether the country arms when the other side has no suspicions at the outset, when there are no expectations to become fulfilled. Well, fortunately, in the laboratory it is possible to design control groups, and in the 1970s, Mark Snyder of the University of Minnesota conducted a series of really ingenious experiments on a special type of self-fulfilling prophecy known as "behavioral confirmation." Behavioral confirmation takes place when people's social expectations lead them to act in a way that causes others to confirm these expectations. In other words, behavioral confirmation is a social type of self-fulfilling prophecy. Let me give you an example from one of the first and best known studies documenting behavioral confirmation. In this study, published by Mark Snyder and Bill Swann, male college students competed in a reaction-time contest with another student to see who could respond most quickly over 24 trials. Students were told that on an alternating basis, they would have access to a "noise weapon" that could deliver a distracting sound to the other person from Level 1 all the way up to Level 6, which was about as loud as a lawnmower. I'll give you a rough sense of what it was like, but let me first suggest you cover your ears or turn down the volume— it's pretty loud. Ready? Here we go... [NOISE]. Okay? Pretty loud. The participants were each given a set of headphones. That was weird! Anyway, they were given a set of headphones so that they could use the weapon against the other person without being blasted by the sound themselves. Specifically, Student A could use the weapon on trials 1, 2, and 3. Then Student B had it for trials 4 through 6. Then back to Student A for another three trials, then to Student B, and so on, but here's the twist: Without Student B knowing it, the experimenters led Student A to think that Student B was either a very competitive, aggressive person, or a very cooperative person. In reality, these expectations were assigned at random. They didn't have anything to do with how aggressive Student B actually was, but the expectations had a dramatic effect. When students were led to expect a partner who was aggressive, they came out with guns blazing, using weapon intensities in the high range 61% of the time, but when students expected a cooperative partner, they only used high intensities 28% of the time. And in response, students who were expected to be competitive returned fire and actually became more aggressive, a textbook example of behavioral confirmation— in this case, a kind of Pygmalion effect gone bad, in which you expect the worst of someone and you get the worst. Because the expectations held by Student A were randomly assigned by the experimenters, similar to a coin toss, we can be sure that the people Student A competed with didn't differ in aggression before the study. In other words, we know that the prophecy was self-fulfilling—that it was a product of expectations. You might think of it like a laboratory version of a security dilemma. But there's more. In a second phase of the experiment, the researchers removed Student A from the study and had Student B compete in another 24 trial reaction-time contest, this time with someone who wasn't told anything about whether Student B was aggressive or cooperative. The experimenters wanted to see whether people who had earlier been expected to behave aggressively would continue to behave aggressively once the person who held that expectation had been removed from the environment. So they replaced Student A with a new person who wasn't led to believe anything about Student B one way or another. What did the researchers find? Under certain circumstances described in the research report, Student A's expectations of aggression or cooperation continued to have an effect on Student B's behavior with a new person. That is, Student B continued to behave more aggressively when that behavior had been expected earlier than when it hadn't. Now, think about that for a moment. What these results suggest is that beliefs can literally create reality, even after the person with the original beliefs has left the scene entirely. The implication is that, for better or worse, the beliefs that your friends, family members, teachers, or coworkers hold about you, may in some cases continue to have an effect, even when these individuals aren't physically present. As you might imagine, this research has received a lot of attention, and to this day, it remains controversial. Robert Rosenthal himself estimates that studies on self-fulfilling prophecies only find the effect about 40% of the time. Also, the research underscores the importance of understanding how random assignment works. Without that, a lot of the studies that we discuss in this course are bound to be confusing. So this is actually a great time for you to finish the first assigned reading, and then right after that, the Random Assignment Assignment, which has a brief tutorial on random sampling and random assignment, both of which are taken from Research Randomizer, a Social Psychology Network partner site. The assignment includes all the instructions that you need, and students tell me that it takes about 15 minutes to complete, start to finish, so it's not a terribly long assignment. Meanwhile, we can't very well end this video without a pop-up question, so here you go!
