Self-fulfilling prophecy

• Steps to the prophecy


  1. The teacher labels a pupil, and based on this label makes predictions about them

  2. The teacher treats the people accordingly, acting as if the prediction is already true

  3. The people internalises the teachers' expectations with become part of their self-concept or self-image, so they now become the kind of people the teacher believe them to be in the first place
• In this study of Oak community school, a California primary school, Rosenthal and Jacobson show that self-fulfilling prophecy at work
• They told the school that they had a new set of tests specifically designed to identify those peoples who would sport ahead. This was untrue, because the test was in fact, simply a standard IQ test
• They picked 20% of the pupils purely random and they told the school again falsely that the test said identified these children as spatters
• When they returned into the school a year later, they found out almost half 47% of those identified pupils had indeed made significant progress
• Rosenthal and Jacobson suggested that teacher believes about pupils had been influenced by the supposed test results
• The teachers had then conveyed these beliefs to the people through the way they interacted with them
• This demonstrates the self-fulfilling prophecy, simply by accepting the prediction that some children would spread ahead, the teachers bought it about the fact that the children were selected at random strongly suggest that if teachers believe a people to be a certain type, they can make him or her into the type
• Most importantly, studies finding illustrates an important interaction is principle that people believe to be true or have real effects, even if the belief was not true originally
• The self-fulfilling prophecy can also produce under achievement if teachers have low expectations of certain children and communicate these expectations in their interaction
• These children may develop a negative self-concept and may become to see themselves as failures and give up thereby fulfilling to this prophecy