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A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that comes true at least in part as a result of a person's belief or expectation that the prediction would come true. [1] In the phenomena, people tend to act the way they have been expected to in order to make the expectations come true. [2]
The self-fulfilling prophecy is essentially the idea that beliefs and expectations can and do create their own reality. Sociologist Robert K. Merton defined a self-fulfilling prophecy as, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true. [2]: 67
Consequently, Thomas stressed societal problems such as intimacy, family, or education as fundamental to the role of the situation when detecting a social world "in which subjective impressions can be projected on to life and thereby become real to projectors". [3] The definition of the situation is a fundamental concept in symbolic interactionism.
In Mind, Self & Society (1934), [4] he showed how infants come to know persons first and only later come to know things. According to Mead, thought is both a social and pragmatic process, based on the model of two persons discussing how to solve a problem. Mead's central concept is the self, the part of an individual's personality composed of ...
Sociologist Robert K. Merton (1948, 1949) built on the Thomas principle to define the notion of a self-fulfilling prophecy: that once a prediction or prophecy is made, actors may accommodate their behaviours and actions so that a statement that would have been false becomes true or, conversely, a statement that would have been true becomes ...
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This mechanism is an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy: the idea that self-held beliefs can come true in reality. When both supervisor and subordinate notice the low performance, the negative expectations are confirmed and the belief is reinforced.
The opposite of the "self-defeating prophecy" then, is the "self-fulfilling prophecy", when an originally unfounded prophecy turns out to be correct because it is believed and acted upon. [ 7 ] The distinction implied between manifest and latent functions was devised to preclude the unintentional confusion between conscious motivations for our ...