Self-fulfilling prophecy

• the process by which somebody's expectations about another can become reality by eliciting behaviours which comfirm the expectations
• interactionist theory which people can choose to reject
• first stage: commiting an act of deviance which elicits a label or a false label may be given by the perceiver, then the individual behaves in ways that confirm the label due to self doubt, leads to blocked opportunities
• attention reinforces the behaviours b ecause the individual is only noticed when they elicit the behaviour
• label of a criminal is hard to shift, this suggests why people reoffend
• pymalion effect: positive labels result in positive behaviour and negative labels need to negative destructive behaviour
• self-defeating prophecy: if given negative feedback people may not ffulfil the label and instead do the opposite of what is predicted
• Rosenthal and Jacobson found that when teachers gave labels of 'intellectual bloomers' to children the IQ of these children increased
• weakness of Rosenthal and Jacobson: the study lacks external validity, as the teachers did not develop the label naturallyso findings may not accurately represent the self-fulfilling prophecy
• strength: Maldon et al, questioned 115 12-13 year olds and their parents asking them to predict how much alcohol the child would drink over the year, the children who drank the most had parents who predicted the most
• weakness of Maldon et al: used selfd report data, relied on parents and childs honesty to report how much alcohol had been drank
• strength: Fuller found that girls in a comprehensive school in London were labelled negatively but ended up achieving higher academically, evidence for self defating
• weakness of Fuller: only girls studied cant generalise across to men