I want you to think of an EXPERIMENT meant to look at the self-fulfilling prophecy.
The self-fulfilling prophecy is a belief that leads to it’s own fulfillment. (Check out page 80 of the book if you’re using ed 13, page 90 of the book if you’re using edition 12, and the chapter 3 lecture for more info).
Essentially what this means is that if you have expectations about something, that thing may come true BECAUSE you expected it. This can happen generally, or in psychology specifically.
Example – If you believe that stocks are going to go down, you may tell your friends/family/coworkers. They get scared and start pulling their stocks out of the market. By pulling out the stocks, the market crashes and the downturn you expected has come to be true. It is important to note that if you had not expected the stocks to crash, they would not have. It is the belief that makes the event happen. This is not just a case of accurate prediction.
A psychology example could be that if you expect a certain child to do well on a cognitive measure, so you give them lots of praise in the practice rounds (maybe subconsciously), this reinforcement may cause them to do better on the cognitive measure than they would have otherwise.
In that case, it is your own expectations about the child that caused their score to be what it is.
Try to think of another example of how this could happen in psychology. Then, think of an experiment (remember that means people are assigned to groups by the researchers) that would show this.
Please answer the following questions about your experiment (just 1-2 sentence for each is fine!):
Who are your participants?
How many groups would you have, and what is the difference between the groups? (i.e., what are you manipulating?)
What is the belief? (remember all self-fulfilling prophesies begin with a particular belief)
What behavior may be caused by that belief?
What is your hypothesis for your study? (remember a hypothesis is a specific prediction about what will happen, so here you should mention if there will be a difference between your groups and what it will be!)
the book is below, if needed.
http://library.lol/main/57E445C06A0076D90CBD680A0A740F44
