Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Robert Rosenthal, a young psychologist at Harvard decided to study how one change in behavior (grade reports from a school teacher) can influence the overall impression (and performance) of a student during the following year of school. When positive and negative reports on performance were given to a student’s teacher for the following year, the students work during this following year improved or declined as a result of the report of their previous year’s performance. Rosenthal (Rosenthal and Jacobson, 2003) called this the Pygmalion Effect and set the stage for many other studies of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. These studies included one conducted by Rosenthal himself in which lab assistants were told that one group of rats were Maze bright while another group of rates were told that the rats were Maze dull. Though these labels had been arbitrarily assigned, the Maze Bright rats actually performed better on mazes then did their Maze dull compatriots.
Other called the Rosenthal Effect by other psychologists, this powerful (and controversial) dynamic has been found to influence many interpersonal relationships. I propose that it plays a major role in the interactions that take place among two people or two groups that strongly disagree regarding special perspectives and practices. While the disagreement might focus initially on one specific viewpoint or action, it can easily expand into a major chasm between the two people or groups in large part because of self-fulfilling prophecies. For example:
You and I hold different views about the funding of child care in our community. When we meet one another at a town meeting, I am very guarded, not wanting to offend you because we have been friends in the past. You sense my guardedness and easily interpret this as “defensiveness” You wonder what I am hiding. I then notice your own guardedness and become even more guarded myself. I wonder what you are hiding. Self-fulfilling prophecy kicks in for both of us. We perceived another person being defensive and in our own protection against this perceived defensiveness we are encouraging the other person to actually become more defensive. Pretty soon, the two of us decide to avoid each other in the future—which further increases our own fear-based assumptions about the other person’s motives and images of us (including assumptions about how they see us and why they are annoyed with us).
A disagreement about child care policies has morphed into suspicion and even hatred of our former friend. The relationship has not been sustained in the midst of differences. Our former friend has become the “Other.”
The Other
In this essay, I have introduced several strategies for countering and closing the chasm that can be fostered by self-fulfilling prophecy. I have encouraged an appreciative perspective and slow, reflective thinking (cf. Schön, 1983; Kahneman, 2013). I have suggested that we need to consider the way the other person in not only seeing the world but also seeing us and our own perspectives and practices. It is in the testing of our own assumptions that we are likely to finally listen to the differing views of another person and learning from these views. Perhaps, as we did in an earlier essay in this series, we might look to Barry Oshry (2018) as our teacher and guide regarding sustaining relationships midst differences:
Purity is one solution to encountering the “other,”
and Tolerance another.
Both are grounded in varying degrees of Power over Love.
. . . there is a third possibility,
one that requires a fundamental transformation in
how we see and experience one another,
a transformation based on the understanding that:
the interaction patterns we fall into
shape how we see and experience one another.
What seems to be a real and solid picture of the “other”
is merely the consequence of the pattern we have fallen into.
Change the pattern of interaction
and our experiences of one another will change.
The possibility of Power and Love will emerge.
