Here - Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

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