The Self-Fulling Prophecy

The Self-Fulling Prophecy:  You Determine Your Own Potential

 

In life, your “I am” statements are the most important self-talk statements that we have. Similar to Henry Ford’s quote (“Whether you say you can or you can’t, you’re right”), we tend to either live up to, or down to, the expectations we set for of ourselves. Because we expect it to come true, it does come true. The prophecy is fulfilled.

 

Robert K. Merton was the sociologist who in 1948 coined this now popular term. Later, in 1963, this idea of self-fulfilling prophecy was confirmed by the Rosenthal study. Teaming up with Lenore Jacobson, the two men conducted a study at an elementary school just south of San Francisco, California. The aim of the study was to see if teachers would react differently towards certain students if told that those selected students were “academic bloomers”- that they were expected to learn more information and more quickly than their peers.

 

What happened was this- Rosenthal and Jacobson gave all the students a “test” and then graded them based on the student’s ability to complete the task. But here’s the catch, the test was bogus and the “academic bloomers” were chosen at random.

 

Sure enough, the results showed that those labeled as “academic bloomers” outperformed the control group even though these academic bloomers were chosen at random.

 

The question then becomes: Why did this occur? Because the students were selected at random, you’d expect to see no difference. Yet, because the teacher believed more in the potential of the “gifted” student, it led to the student believing more in his or herself, and in turn, their performance improved.

 

The morale of the story is this: The best predictor of one’s success in life is directly related to the strength in which they believe in themselves.