UCLA Schemas and Self Fulfilling Prophecy Questions
UCLA Schemas and Self Fulfilling Prophecy Questions
A self-fulfilling prophecy is a belief or expectation that an individual holds about a future event that manifests because the individual holds it (Good Therapy, 2015).
For example, if you wake up and immediately think—perhaps for no particular reason at all—that today is going to be a terrible day, your attitude might make your prediction come true. You may unconsciously work to affirm your belief by ignoring the positive, amplifying the negative, and behaving in ways that are unlikely to contribute to an enjoyable day.
This concept appears regularly in culture and art, and plenty of examples of it can be found in literary works.
One of the classic examples of a self-fulfilling prophecy comes from the Greek story of Oedipus. In the story, Oedipus’s father Laius is warned that his son will eventually kill him. To avoid meeting this fate, he abandons his son and leaves him to die.
Oedipus was found and raised by foster parents, under the assumption that they were his real parents. One day, he is also confronted with a dire warning—that he will kill his father and marry his widowed mother. Of course, Oedipus has no wish to kill the man he believes is his father or marry the woman he believes is his mother, so he abandons his home and foster parents and heads off to the city.
In the city, he meets a stranger and ends up in a fight with him. Once Oedipus kills the strange man, he marries his widow. He later learns that the man he killed was his actual father and that his new bride is actually his mother. By trying to avoid fate, both Laius and Oedipus manifested the prophecies.
This compelling tale helped the self-fulfilling prophecy become a popular trope in literature and film, but it’s also a much-researched concept in psychology.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in Psychology
Psychologists have found strong evidence for the impact of our beliefs and expectations on outcomes, particularly when we are convinced that our predictions will manifest, even when we aren’t aware that we hold the expectation.
A commonly understood example of a self-fulfilling prophecy in psychology is what is known as the placebo effect (Isaksen, 2012). The placebo effect refers to the improvements in outcomes measured in subjects of scientific studies or clinical trials, even when the participants did not receive any meaningful treatment. The participants’ belief effects the “treatment” that they experience.
This effect was discovered during clinical trials and can be so strong that new measures were put in place to account for its impact on an experiment’s findings. Research on the placebo effect has proven that belief can be a very powerful thing.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in Sociology: A Look at the Theory of Robert Merton
Not only is the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy an important one in psychological research, but it is also a well-known phenomenon in the field of sociology, where it was first discovered and defined by sociologist Robert Merton.
Merton was born in 1910 to poor Eastern European immigrants and was raised in Philadelphia, where he became fascinated with sociology after attending a class at Temple College.
After graduating, he moved on to Harvard University and began studying under some of the leading sociologists of the time.
By his second year at Harvard, Merton was already publishing with some of these leading sociologists, and he eventually became one of the most influential social scientists himself (Calhoun, 2003).
Perhaps it was his upbringing in one of the slums of South Philadelphia that informed his theory of the self-fulfilling prophecy; after all, his is one of the classic “American dream” trajectories that is usually accompanied by a strong conviction in one’s talents and abilities.
Merton coined the term “self-fulfilling prophecy,” defining it as:
“A false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true.”
Merton, 1968, p. 477
In other words, Merton noticed that sometimes a belief brings about consequences that cause reality to match the belief. Generally, those at the center of a self-fulfilling prophecy don’t understand that their beliefs caused the consequences they expected or feared—it’s often unintentional, unlike self-motivation or self-confidence.
These prophecies can involve intrapersonal processes (i.e., an individual’s belief affects his or her own behavior) and/or interpersonal processes (i.e., an individual’s belief affects another’s behavior).
The placebo effect is one example of an intrapersonal self-fulfilling prophecy: expectations for a spouse to cheat contribute to that spouse actually cheating (Biggs, 2009).
Although self-fulfilling prophecies can manifest in a variety of ways, Merton was most interested in understanding how the phenomenon plays out in racial prejudice and discrimination. He noticed that people with racial prejudices were likely to treat people of other races in a way that led to a confirmation of their prejudices.
For example, those who considered people of color to be intellectually inferior avoided talking to them, giving no chance to prove the racist individual wrong.
Unsurprisingly, when a whole group of people is treated as if they are intellectually inferior, they are not given the same opportunities afforded to others that allow them to build their knowledge and improve their abilities.
When such groups of people know they are viewed as “other” or “lesser than,” then the average performance of the discriminated group is lower. It is an unfortunate cycle.
