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Editorial Let’s do some research June 2010 By Raj Persaud I was asked to write this by Dr Raja Mukherjee for our Trust’s new journal. Here it is… If we asked you to predict now whether you were going to perform some research and publish it, say in the next year, what would your answer be? Perhaps, from past experience you might admit that this is not likely. On the other hand, even if wasn’t particularly likely, you may also feel that gathering data is something that you ought to be doing, and given the social pressure and management demands (me asking you publicly what your research plans are) you might impulsively declare, that yes research is something you are planning and intending. Now, here is the interesting research question – in merely asking you to predict the future – do we change it? Let’s say we ran an experiment where we divided a sample of the electorate into two groups, and for one, we asked them to predict whether they were going to vote or not, while we did nothing pertinent to the second group; they acted as a control. Now, if we followed these two samples up into the future, to examine what they eventually did in the privacy of the polling booth; the astonishing result is that being asked to predict the future...does change it. Those who are asked to forecast whether they are going to vote, tend to confirm they will, and to do so much more than would be expected from their past behaviour. They are responding to external expectation (and internal drivers of a similar nature) so they manage the impression they want to create of being responsible citizens, by predicting a behaviour they were in fact much less likely to perform in reality. Having foretold that they will take part in a ballot, they tend to go ahead and actually vote. Yet if they weren’t asked to predict the future, they were not particularly likely to do any casting at all. We can demonstrate this experimentally by comparing the group asked to predict the future with the control group, who were not asked to make predictions. This second group vote at the lower baseline rate of the general population, which is, not that much. Why does being asked to predict that you are going to vote, make it much more likely that you will? The short answer is that this particular psychological phenomenon, like most others, inspires many theories that attempt to account for it, but no one is exactly sure which is the truth. A seminal paper on this effect in the Journal of Consumer Psychology by Business Psychologists Eric Spangenberg of Washington State University and Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington, pointed out that the trend could be used powerfully to manipulate large populations into behaviours they had previously little intention of performing. Spangenberg and Greenwald are probably the two world authorities on this intriguing ‘self-prophecy effect’ and their paper entitled ‘Social Influence by Requesting Self-Prophecy’ showed how asking people to predict their own behaviour in the future was associated, on follow up, with spectacularly less cheating in tests, significantly more attendance at health clubs, and more voting. One theory is that we like to see ourselves as consistent creatures, and having made a prediction of our behaviour in the future, not to confirm the prediction by performing the behaviour, would force us to confront a rather unpalatable truth; we are unreliable, inconsistent people who don’t know our own minds. 4 Surrey and Borders Online Journal www.sabp.nhs.uk/journal
We are not so aware of the hidden forces at work generated by the social expectations of being asked about our plans in front of another, which push us into making a prediction at variance with what we would really do in the privacy of our own un-observed lives. Having made the prediction, we then work to fall into line with it. Another, related, theory is that this is an example of the power of expectation. Psychologists have demonstrated for almost half a century now, that if teachers are manipulated into expecting their pupils to be intelligent or stupid, they then work to render these expectations self-fulfilling prophecies. Judges give directions to juries at the beginnings of trials that appear to bias the outcome in line with the bench’s expectation of the future. We also directly seem to suffer for this effect – if our expectation of ourselves is manipulated experimentally, we then provide later behavioural confirmation of our expectations of ourselves. More on Expectations One of the most famous experiments in Social Psychology which demonstrated the power of expectation is a 1977 study by a team lead by Mark Snyder, now at the University of Minnesota, in which men were shown photographs of a woman to whom they would be talking by phone. The woman in the pictures was randomised to being either extremely physically attractive or unattractive (as rated by other independent observers). What the men taking part in the experiment didn’t know, was that those sneaky psychologists had told a porky pie, and the photographs were not only randomly assigned to the men, but they also did not correspond in any way to the actual woman with whom they had the phone conversation. While it would come as no surprise that the men behaved differently to the women during the phone conversation depending on their (manipulated) beliefs on her physical appearance, the really surprising finding was that independent ratings of the women's segments of the conversations revealed that females whose conversational partners believed them to be less appealing, actually behaved and sounded less attractively (eg they were rated as sounding less warm and interesting). The women, just as the men, had also been kept completely in the dark by the psychologists about the photograph manipulation. They were not aware it had taken place. This effect, therefore, had to have been mediated in some way through the men's behavior. One possibility, is that the men who were talking to someone they believed to be unattractive, were themselves less affable than men who believed they were talking to an attractive woman. This in turn had an impact on the way the women responded, and then they way they came over to an independent observer. The ‘Pygmalion Effect’ is a special instance of the self-fulfilling prophecy; where having an expectation of another, itself causes that target to modify their performance so it falls into line with the expectation of the first party. Just in case you are starting to think that Self-Fulfilling Prophecies only inhabit the obscure world of experimental Psychology, remember we are living through a banking crisis and suffering its long term impact, and banking crises are a form of self-fulfilling prophecy. Because a rumour starts that a bank may fail, this precipitates a run on that bank, which in itself inevitably leads to its collapse. This is why Chancellors of the Exchequer hot foot it to the nearest TV studio to ‘steady the markets’ at the slightest hint of such runs on major financial institutions. Governments, and the whole financial system, live in terror of the power of the self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s so powerful and reliable that you can literally ‘bank’ on it. Editorial Surrey and Borders Online Journal www.sabp.nhs.uk/journal 5
Page 1 and 2: Issue 1 Summer 2010 Surrey and Bord
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