Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Summary

The main focus of this experiment is the self-fulfilling prophecy. It is described as the concept that if we expect something to happen in a certain way our expectation will tend to make it so. In this study, Robert Rosenthal focuses on how self-fulfilling biases and expectancies occur in school classrooms. Rosenthal suspected that when an elementary teacher is provided with information that shows that some students are more intelligent than others, the teacher may behave in ways unknowingly that can encourage the performance of the “intelligent” students, causing them to excel. Rosenthal tested his hypothesis with the cooperation of the Oak School administration. All of the students in grades one through six were given an intelligence quiz in the beginning of the academic year. He would tell the teachers it was another test than what it actually was, this was important because it caused teachers to create expectations, which was necessary for the experiment to be successful. At random, children were assigned to the top 10 lists; these children were a part of the experimental group. The only difference between the two groups of children was that the teachers thought that some were more intelligent than the others. Near the …show more content…
It was also clear that there was a huge difference in grades one and two. There are many reasons to why there may have been such a difference, one is that many people believe that younger children are like sponges and the more pressure that you apply to them, the more that they will soak things up and learn. One of the two major findings of this study was that experiments that could be conducted in labs can many times be applied to real-world situations. Another major finding of the experiment was that the effect was very strong in the early grades, but almost non-existent in the older