I'm going to be blunt and honest with you today. I don't feel like writing a blog. So, I'm just going to tell you about my favourite psychology prophecy: self-fulfilling prophecy. I also want to mention that this is not my favourite "theory" because it's a "prophecy" but I hope to one day tell you about my favourite theory too (in case you're wondering, or are nerdy like me and want to look it up, it's reactance theory).
Back to self-fulfilling prophecy. Let me start off by defining it for you so you can join me in my excitement! Self-fullfing prophecy is when a person will have expectations (either good or bad) about a person, event, or situation and then treats that person, event, or situation accordingly, causing their expectations to be fulfilled due to their behaviours towards them. That's quite the wordy explanation but I'll explain it better with an example... maybe one of these will sound familiar to you:
1. You have to go to a friend's birthday party and don't know anyone. You say to yourself, "this is going to suck and no one is going to talk to me". You go to the party and don't talk to anyone then leave an hour later telling yourself, "I knew no one would talk to me".
2. You have to go to a wedding and you only know people in the wedding party. You tell yourself, "It's okay that I don't know anyone, this is a great opportunity to make friends and this party is going to be off the hook" (because you decide you're a gangster today). You go to the wedding, cry during the ceremony, make friends at the reception, eat two slices of cake, offer to help clean up, make friends with the family, and leave at 2am because you had such a wonderful time. As you leave you tell yourself, "I knew that would be a fun wedding".
HA! I tricked you! Those events are both eerily similar but because the person had different expectation to both events the results ended up differently. Make sense now? The expectations shaped the behaviours which ultimately dictated the outcome of the events (wow, that ended up being a pretty good sentence).
The reason why this prophecy is my favourite is because it's so simple it should be common sense and yet so complex it could change your entire outlook on life! Imagine the mental barriers you could remove if you just stopped believing they existed, or if you had never even know they existed in the first place. Think of how socially, academically, or even athletically successful you could be if you just had more positive expectations of yourself in that area of your life! Think of how different you could feel today if you just expected that you would have a good day :) I love this prophecy! Obviously it's not foolproof and I would never say that people only have themselves to blame for their unhappiness or themselves to thank for their happiness, but I do believe it's a start when having a positive outlook on life.
I think I'm almost at the point of over-stating how awesome this prophecy really is but if you're still not on my side I have one final story for you! It begins in elementary school, which was still kindergarten to grade seven when I was a child (arg, here I go dating myself). Every year I got a C or a C+ in math. It wasn't my subject. Actually, this was before I really started developing my love for school all together. However, when I was in grade four I went with my mom to parent-teacher interviews and my teacher at the time had set up a series of mathematical puzzles for parents to do with their children while they waited for their turn to talk to the teacher. I, of course, hated this at the time but my mother and sister insisted on doing ALL TEN PUZZLES; and after about fifteen minutes they had solved about 3/4 of them. The next day in class my teacher was talking about the puzzles and went through each of puzzles telling us what the answers were. I didn't really care about the answers at the time but apparently they stuck...
Four years later I entered my first year of middle school (grade 8). I don't remember anything about my first few days of class except I remember going to my gr.8 math class and would you believe it our teacher thought it would be fun to start the first day of class with mathematical puzzles. Ten puzzles, we had ten minutes to see how many we could solve. Guess how many I solved... yup, all of them... and I had about eight minutes to spare. I kid you not, the entire class and the teacher thought I was a genius. A few months after that we were working on a different worksheet in class, and going through the answers, and at one point I zoned out and stopped paying attention and then after a few minutes snapped back to reality and realized the entire class was looking at me. I didn't realize why they were looking at me until I noticed that we were on the final and most difficult question of the worksheet and they were all wondering if I had gotten the answer right. That was actually the moment that it dawned on me that people thought I was actually good at math -- that they expected me to know the answers that other people didn't know.
I can't say for sure that this is a perfect example of self-fulfilling prophecy but I still think it's a pretty interesting story. It's possible that I just started liking school more because I was older and more mature. Or maybe my brain had developed more because I was then a teenager instead of a child so it was easier for me to understand mathematical concepts. Or, maybe my teacher and classmates started treating me like I was good at math and I subconsciously started to believe it. I'm not sure which is the true answer but I ended up get the highest mark in my class in gr.8 and doing math honours for gr.9-12 and finishing with mostly A's in those classes too (don't be too impressed I had my fair share of poor grades in other classes as well). I even ended up doing the first year of my degree in mathematics and physics before I switched over to psychology (this is actually why I ended up getting a BSc and not a BA. My math credits transferred over to a BSc so I didn't have to repeat first year if I got a BSc, this is probably the only time in the history of the world that anyone has ever gotten a BSc by default). So, it's a happy ending after all.
Anyhoo, hopefully this will help inspire you to expect good things about today. Maybe this will even help you to see someone more clearly after they fell or rose to your expectations previously. As it may be this may also help you write a paper that you just can't seem to get through right now...
Interesting how I didn't feel like writing a blog today and ended up with this little number. Maybe if I had convinced myself earlier that I did feel like writing a blog you would've ended up reading something different...
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