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A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that, in being made, actually causes itself to become true. For example, in the stock market, if it is widely believed that a crash is imminent, this may reduce confidence and actually cause such a crash. Or, if a candidate in an election openly declares he does not believe he can win, this may increase voter apathy and result in poor support for his campaign. Self-fulfilling prophecy is sometimes seen as a manifestation of positive feedback in human society. In short, because a given prophecy was known, and was sufficiently credible, it affected people's actions and caused itself. Robert K. Merton is usually acknowledged as the maker of this phrase and using it in sociology.
Another example is Moore's law in semiconductor industry.
Examples abound in studies of cognitive dissonance theory and the related self-perception theory; People will often change their attitudes to come into line with what they profess publicly.
Other specific examples discussed in psychology include:
- Clever Hans effect
- expectancy effect
- Hawthorne effect
- placebo effectThe placebo effect (also known as non-specific effects is the phenomenon that a patient's symptoms can be alleviated by an otherwise ineffective treatment, apparently because the individual expects or believes that it will work. Some people consider this
- pygmalion effectThe Pygmalion effect named after the Greek myth of Pygmalion and his statue, is expressed by saying: People tend to behave as you expect they will. self-fulfilling prophecy George Bernard Shaw wrote a play, Pygmalion which was later popularized by the mus
attitude attribution
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