Describe, Compare and Evaluate the Self-Fulfilling Prohecy

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Describe the SFP including examples from psychologists. The self-fulfilling prophecy is the theory that when an individual is labelled in some sort of way, then the individual begins to see themselves as what the label portrays them as and begin to act the way they are labelled. There is typically three stages to the self-fulfilling prophecy, in the first stage the person is labelled and so is treated according to the label, then in the second stage the person reacts by behaving according to the label and finally the person fulfils the prophecy by their acquired behaviour which is what was expected of them. An example of self-fulfilling prophecy in action would be the Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968 where the experimenters told teachers at the start of school that certain pupils were expected to do well. The teachers thought that the predictions were made from the IQ test that they had taken but in reality the chosen pupils were randomly selected. At the end of the school year, the students that were labelled to do well’s IQ improved more than the other pupils. The latter was thought to be because the students that were labelled to do well must have been treated differently than the other students as the students labelled to do well would have been given more attention and praise by the teachers. The Jahoda’s study of names related to behaviour 1954 also manifests the self-fulfilling prophecy at work. Jahoda studied a Ghanian ethnic group called the Ashanti where the boys were named according to the day they were born in. For example, the Monday children were expected to be quiet and peaceful, while the Wednesday children were expected to be short-tempered and aggressive. It was discovered from the court records that children born on Wednesday were more likely to be convicted for crimes which shows the self-fulfilling prophecy at work. Another example of a study

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