Episode Details

Summary

The self-fulfilling prophecy describes how our expectations of others can lead them to act in a way that confirms those expectations. As leaders it's time to reset our expectations so we can get the best out of our people and stop holding them back.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 26 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today's biggest leadership challenges. This week we're looking at self-fulfilling prophecies, and why we get what we expect.

It's a sunny Wednesday in 1932 as the CEO of Last National Bank walks towards his desk. The bank is thriving and financially strong, and Cartright Millingville is rightly proud of the business he oversees. But as he continues past the tellers, he notices the queue of people lining up is much longer than usual - nothing to worry about at this point, but certainly different to most Wednesday mornings. As he takes a seat at this desk the noise and activity in the bank gradually grows, with people becoming increasingly unruly. And that's because this is no ordinary day - hundreds of people are lining up to withdraw all of their funds from the bank, having heard a rumour of the bank's imminent collapse. Despite the bank's strong financial position, it could not survive the initially false, but ultimately true, perception that it might be at risk. The bank collapsed and closed its doors permanently the same day. The false perception became fact.

The sociologist Robert Merton shares this example in his classic 1948 paper - The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. In the paper he describes how our expectations can influence the world around us. Thinking that a financial institution is at risk of collapse can ultimately lead to its collapse. In the same way, our expectations of others can lead them to behave in line with these expectations. Merton defines the self-fulfilling prophecy as "a false definition of the situation evoking a new behaviour which makes the originally false conception come true." And, of course, this outcome strengthens the original perception of the situation, as Merton continues "for the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning".

A common example of a self-fulfilling prophecy is the placebo effect. In drug trials, prospective new medications are put up against placebo pills. These placebo pills have no direct physical impact on the individual. But believing that a placebo tablet will have an impact is often enough for it to actually have that impact. For that reason, finding drugs that work better than placebos can be difficult. It's not that a placebo is neutral - the expectation the person has of the placebo tablet actually makes that outcome more likely. More recent research demonstrates that the placebo effect is so strong, it can still work even when the person knows that they're taking a placebo. By way of example, Dr Ted Kaptchuk treated patients with irritable bowel syndrome by giving them a tablet openly identified to the patient as a placebo. This group demonstrated significant improvement in their symptoms compared to a group that didn't receive a placebo. As Dr Kaptchuck notes, this clearly can't work for all medical issues. However he sees the greatest potential for so called 'open-label' placebo treatments in conditions that are largely measured through self-observation - conditions including pain, nausea and fatigue. Placebo tablets and treatments are a great example of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Classic experiments in schools have also shown the impact of the self-fulfilling prophecy. In the 1960s, Rosenthal and Jacobsen undertook a series of experiments with teachers and students. In one experiment, they chose a group of students at random and told te