You Just Have To Believe!!

Hey all!  What's this, two posts within one week?  Madness, I know, but I guess that's what happens when I get stuck in summer/work limbo...

Anyways, like most posts I write nowadays, this one starts with a story...  Quite a few decades back, there was a psychologist named Rosenthal who was interested in studying the power of beliefs.  Anyways, Rosenthal was able to conduct an experiment on a group of elementary students.  He started by giving  them an IQ test, just to start off.  After doing his testing, he let the teachers know that some of the students, even though they may not show it at the time, are 'late bloomers,' or students who are going to do very well in the future.

The school year goes by, and Rosenthal decides to administer another IQ test to see if there were any changes.  Well, the majority of the students had about a four point increase in their IQ, which is pretty normal.  Yet, amazingly, as Rosenthal had predicted, those that were designated as 'late bloomers' gained, on average, about fifteen points.

So, what was the secret?  How did Rosenthal know that some students would do so well?  Simply put, he didn't, which is why this experiment is so amazing.  You see, all of the students Rosenthal had labelled as 'late bloomers' were students that he randomly selected; there was nothing more to it than that.  Yet, such a drastic difference came about due to something people simply believed.  That couldn't hold for other situations, right?

Well, when Rosenthal first published this experiment (after he finally found a journal willing to publish it...), people refused to believe him.  In fact, one experimenter, willing to discredit Rosenthal's results,  agreed to  work with Rosenthal to try and test this again, but with rats this time.  So, a little bit different of an experiment, but it was essentially the same idea...  Graduate students were given rats, yet some graduate students were told that they had received 'maze bright' rats.  Again, the genius of this experiment was that there was no real difference between the rats; everything was purely random.  Yet, similar to the results from the previous experiment, the rats that were labelled as 'maze bright' ended up running a maze faster and what not.  So, even in a situation with rats, this same phenomenon seems to be present...  Madness!

So, many of you have probably heard of the term before, but this phenomenon was labelled a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The definition, according to Lieberman's lecture, is "when an originally false social belief leads to its own fulfillment."  As you can see in the previous experiments, the false social belief was that the students/rats were different than everyone else when they should have been the same as everyone else.  Yet, simply because the teachers believed that their rat/child was special, they did end up becoming special...

There have been other cases where the powers of a self-fulfilling prophecy have held true...  The most devastating example is Black Wednesday of 1932 (another example from Lieberman's lecture), when a person wondered out loud if a bank was closing due to what appeared to be a large number of people making withdrawals...  People heard this, started to fear that they would lose their money in the bank, and thus withdrew their money.  Well, as you can guess, so many people ended up withdrawing their money that the bank did end up closing, leading to an ironic end...

So yes, self-fulfilling prophecies can be quite powerful in both positive and negative aspects.  But, they can get really dangerous when they create a self-reinforcing cycle.  For example, let's say that a person believes that no one else really likes them.  This belief then leads them to be depressed or have poor social interactions with others, thus leading to others avoiding interacting with that person.  The person starts to see that this is the case, and thus their self-fulfilling prophecy that no one really likes them is reinforced.  In fact, this may lead to an even stronger belief in this prophecy, leading to even worse social interactions, and thus reinforcing the cycle continuously.  I didn't explain that very well, but hopefully y'all understand...

I guess the big idea is that what we believe has a very strong effect on what can happen...  It sounds weird, but as you can see from the experiments, there is some effect...  Part of the way it works is also that if you have a self-fulfilling prophecy, then you start to look for things to confirm your prophecy, even if the evidence isn't really there/a misconstrual (something that psychologists tend to refer to as confirmation bias).  In other words, sometimes people only see what they want to see...  So, I guess it shows the importance of realizing how much we believe may affect possibly all aspects of our lives.  It may be good to have others to keep us (and our beliefs) in check every now and then, no?  The more I look into social psychology, the more it seems that we can't really trust ourselves/think we're truly objective, non-bias observers...   Just something good to realize, I guess...  Oh well, catch y'all next time!