Behavioral confirmation

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Behavioral confirmation is a type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people's social expectations lead them to behave in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations. [1] The phenomenon of belief creating reality is known by several names in literature: self-fulfilling prophecy, expectancy confirmation, and behavioral confirmation, which was first coined by social psychologist Mark Snyder in 1984. Snyder preferred this term because it emphasizes that it is the target's actual behavior that confirms the perceiver's beliefs. [2] : 68 

Contents

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Preconceived beliefs and expectations are used by human beings when they interact with others, as guides to action. Their actions may then guide the interacting partner to behave in a way that confirms the individual's initial beliefs. The self-fulfilling prophecy is essentially the idea that beliefs and expectations can and do create their own reality. Sociologist Robert K. Merton defined a self-fulfilling prophecy as, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true. [2] : 67 

Self-fulfilling prophecy focuses on the behavior of the perceiver in electing expected behavior from the target, whereas behavioral confirmation focuses on the role of the target's behavior in confirming the perceiver's beliefs. [3]

Research

Research has shown that a person (referred to as a perceiver) who possesses beliefs about another person (referred to as a target) will often act on these beliefs in ways that lead the target to actually behave in ways that confirm the perceiver's original beliefs. [4]

In one demonstration of behavioral confirmation in social interaction, Snyder and colleagues had previously unacquainted male and female partners get acquainted through a telephone-like intercom system. The male participants were referred to as the perceivers, and the female participants were referred to as the targets. Prior to their conversations, the experimenter gave the male participants a Polaroid picture and led them to believe that it depicted their female partners. The male participants were unaware that, in fact, the pictures were not of their partners. The experimenter gave the perceivers pictures which portrayed either physically attractive or physically unattractive women in order to activate the perceiver's stereotypes that they may possess concerning attractive and unattractive people. The perceiver-target dyads engaged in a 10-minute, unstructured conversation, which was initiated by the perceivers. Individuals, identified as the raters, listened in on only the targets' contributions to the conversations and rated their impressions of the targets. Results showed that targets whose partners believed them to be physically attractive came to behave in a more sociable, warm, and outgoing manner than targets whose partners believed them to be physically unattractive. Consequently, targets behaviorally confirmed the perceivers' beliefs, thus turning the perceivers' beliefs into self-fulfilling prophecies. The study also supported and displayed the physical attractiveness stereotype. [4] : 963–964 

These findings suggest that human beings, who are the targets of many perceivers in everyday life, may routinely act in ways which are consistent not with their own attitudes, beliefs, or feelings; but rather with the perceptions and stereotypes which others hold of them and their attributes. This seems to suggest that the power of others' beliefs over one's behaviour is extremely strong. [5]

Mechanisms

Snyder proposed a four-step sequence in which behavioral confirmation occurs:

  1. The perceiver adopts beliefs about the target
  2. The perceiver acts as if these beliefs were true and treats the target accordingly
  3. The target assimilates his or her behavior to the perceiver's overtures
  4. The perceiver interprets the target's behavior as confirmation of his or her original beliefs. [2] : 69 

Motivational foundations

The perceiver and the target have a common goal of getting acquainted with one other, and they do so in different functions. Behavioral confirmation occurs from the combination of a perceiver who is acting in the service of the knowledge function and a target whose behaviors serve an adjustive function.

The perceiver uses knowledge motivations in order to get a stable and predictable view of those whom one interacts, eliciting behavioral confirmation. [6] : 241  Perceivers use knowledge-oriented strategies, which occur when perceivers view their interactions with targets as opportunities to find out about their targets' personality and to check their impressions of targets, leading perceivers to ask belief-confirming questions. The perceiver asks the target questions in order to form stable and predictable impressions of their partner, and perceivers tend to confidently assume that possession of even the limited information gathered about the other person gives them the ability to predict that that person's future will be consistent with the impressions gathered. [6] : 238 

When the target is motivated by adjustive functions, they are motivated to try to get along with their partners and to have a smooth and pleasant conversation with the perceiver. The adjustive function motivates the targets to reciprocate perceivers' overtures and thereby to behaviorally confirm perceivers' erroneous beliefs. [4] : 971  Without the adjustive function, this may lead to behavioral disconfirmation.

Examples

Critique

The principle objection to the idea of behavioral confirmation is that the laboratory situations that are used in the research often do not map onto real-world social interaction easily. [11] In addition, it is argued that behavioral disconfirmation is just as likely to develop out of expectancies as are self-fulfilling expectations. A strong criticism by Lee Jussim is the allegation that, in all previous behavioral confirmation studies, the participants have been falsely misled about the targets' characteristics; however, in real life, people's expectations are generally correct. To combat such critique, behavioral confirmation has adapted to introduce a non-conscious element. [12] Even though there are clearly pitfalls to the phenomenon, it has continuously been studied over the past few decades, highlighting its importance in psychology. [13]

Related Research Articles

Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the relationship between mental states and social situations, studying the social conditions under which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur, and how these variables influence social interactions.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs.

In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is described as the mental disturbance people feel when they realize their cognitions and actions are inconsistent or contradictory. This may ultimately result in some change in their cognitions or actions to cause greater alignment between them so as to reduce this dissonance. Relevant items of information include peoples' actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. According to this theory, when an action or idea is psychologically inconsistent with the other, people do all in their power to change either so that they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.

A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that comes true at least in part as a result of a person's belief or expectation that the prediction would come true. In the phenomena, people tend to act the way they have been expected to in order to make the expectations come true. Self-fulfilling prophecies are an example of the more general phenomenon of positive feedback loops. A self-fulfilling prophecy can have either negative or positive outcomes. Merely applying a label to someone or something can affect the perception of the person/thing and create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Interpersonal communication plays a significant role in establishing these phenomena as well as impacting the labeling process.

The Pygmalion effect is a psychological phenomenon in which high expectations lead to improved performance in a given area and low expectations lead to worse performance. It is named after the Greek myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell so much in love with the perfectly beautiful statue he created that the statue came to life. The psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson present a view, that has been called into question as a result of later research findings, in their book Pygmalion in the Classroom; borrowing something of the myth by advancing the idea that teachers' expectations of their students affect the students' performance. Rosenthal and Jacobson held that high expectations lead to better performance and low expectations lead to worse, both effects leading to self-fulfilling prophecy.

Expectancy theory proposes that an individual will behave or act in a certain way because they are motivated to select a specific behavior over others due to what they expect the result of that selected behavior will be. In essence, the motivation of the behavior selection is determined by the desirability of the outcome. However, at the core of the theory is the cognitive process of how an individual processes the different motivational elements. This is done before making the ultimate choice. The outcome is not the sole determining factor in making the decision of how to behave.

The halo effect is the proclivity for positive impressions of a person, company, country, brand, or product in one area to positively influence one's opinion or feelings. The halo effect is "the name given to the phenomenon whereby evaluators tend to be influenced by their previous judgments of performance or personality." The halo effect is a cognitive bias which can prevent someone from forming an image of a person, a product or a brand based on the sum of all objective circumstances at hand.

The physical attractiveness stereotype, commonly known as the "beautiful-is-good" stereotype, is the tendency to assume that physically attractive individuals, coinciding with social beauty standards, also possess other desirable personality traits, such as intelligence, social competence, and morality. The target benefits from what has been coined as “pretty privilege”, namely social, economic, and political advantages or benefits. Physical attractiveness can have a significant effect on how people are judged in terms of employment or social opportunities, friendship, sexual behavior, and marriage.

John A. Bargh is a social psychologist currently working at Yale University, where he has formed the Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation (ACME) Laboratory. Bargh's work focuses on automaticity and unconscious processing as a method to better understand social behavior, as well as philosophical topics such as free will. Much of Bargh's work investigates whether behaviors thought to be under volitional control may result from automatic interpretations of and reactions to external stimuli, such as words.

Disconfirmed expectancy is a psychological term for what is commonly known as a failed prophecy. According to the American social psychologist Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, disconfirmed expectancies create a state of psychological discomfort because the outcome contradicts expectancy. Upon recognizing the falsification of an expected event an individual will experience the competing cognitions, "I believe [X]," and, "I observed [Y]." The individual must either discard the now disconfirmed belief or justify why it has not actually been disconfirmed. As such, disconfirmed expectancy and the factors surrounding the individual's consequent actions have been studied in various settings.

Identity negotiation refers to the processes through which people reach agreements regarding "who is who" in their relationships. Once these agreements are reached, people are expected to remain faithful to the identities they have agreed to assume. The process of identity negotiation thus establishes what people can expect of one another. Identity negotiation thus provides the interpersonal "glue" that holds relationships together.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stereotype</span> Generalized but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing

In social psychology, a stereotype is a generalized belief about a particular category of people. It is an expectation that people might have about every person of a particular group. The type of expectation can vary; it can be, for example, an expectation about the group's personality, preferences, appearance or ability. Stereotypes are often overgeneralized, inaccurate, and resistant to new information. A stereotype does not necessarily need to be a negative assumption. They may be positive, neutral, or negative.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-image</span> Mental picture of self that comes from different sources

Self-image is the mental picture, generally of a kind that is quite resistant to change, that depicts not only details that are potentially available to an objective investigation by others, but also items that have been learned by persons about themselves, either from personal experiences or by internalizing the judgments of others. In some formulations, it is a component of self-concept.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steven Neuberg</span>

Steven L. Neuberg is an American experimental social psychologist whose research has contributed to topics pertaining to person perception, impression formation, stereotyping, prejudice, self-fulfilling prophecies, stereotype threat, and prosocial behavior. His research can be broadly characterized as exploring the ways motives and goals shape social thought processes; extending this approach, his later work employs the adaptationist logic of evolutionary psychology to inform the study of social cognition and social behavior. Neuberg has published over sixty scholarly articles and chapters, and has co-authored a multi-edition social psychology textbook with his colleagues Douglas Kenrick and Robert Cialdini.

The Proteus effect describes a phenomenon in which the behavior of an individual, within virtual worlds, is changed by the characteristics of their avatar. This change is due to the individual's knowledge about the behaviors that other users who are part of that virtual environment typically associate with those characteristics. Like the adjective protean, the concept's name is an allusion to the shape changing abilities of the Greek god Proteus. The Proteus effect was first introduced by researchers Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford University in June 2007. It is considered an area of research concerned with the examination of the behavioral effects of changing a user's embodied avatar.

Attributional ambiguity is a psychological attribution concept describing the difficulty that members of stigmatized or negatively stereotyped groups may have in interpreting feedback. According to this concept, a person who perceives themselves as stigmatized can attribute negative feedback to prejudice. This can lead stigmatized group members to feel uncertainty about whether negative outcomes are due to discrimination against them or their own behavior. In comparison, they might discredit positive feedback as a form of sympathy rather than seeing it as the result of their ability and achievement. The term was coined by Melvin Snyder, Robert E. Kleck, Angelo Strenta, and Steven J. Mentzer in 1979 before being popularized by Jennifer Crocker, Brenda Major and their colleagues in the 1990s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Assimilation and contrast effects</span>

The assimilation effect, assimilation bias or biased assimilation is a bias in evaluative judgments towards the position of a context stimulus, while contrast effects describe a negative correlation between a judgment and contextual information.

In psychology, a first impression is the event when one person first encounters another person and forms a mental image of that person. Impression accuracy varies depending on the observer and the target being observed. First impressions are based on a wide range of characteristics: age, race, culture, language, gender, physical appearance, accent, posture, voice, number of people present, economic status, and time allowed to process. The first impressions individuals give to others could greatly influence how they are treated and viewed in many contexts of everyday life.

Personality judgment is the process by which people perceive each other's personalities through acquisition of certain information about others, or meeting others in person. The purpose of studying personality judgment is to understand past behavior exhibited by individuals and predict future behavior. Theories concerning personality judgment focus on the accuracy of personality judgments and the effects of personality judgments on various aspects of social interactions. Determining how people judge personality is important because personality judgments often influence individuals' behaviors.

The Golem effect is a psychological phenomenon in which lower expectations placed upon individuals either by supervisors or the individual themselves lead to poorer performance by the individual. This effect is mostly seen and studied in educational and organizational environments. It is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy.

References

  1. ↑ Myers, David G. (2015). Exploring Social Psychology (Seventh ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education. p. 86.
  2. 1 2 3 Snyder, Mark (1992). "Motivational Foundations of Behavioral Confirmation". Advances in Experimental Social Psychology Volume 25. Vol. 25. pp. 67–114. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60282-8. ISBN   9780120152254.{{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
  3. ↑ Bordens, Kenneth S.; Horowitz, Irwin A. (2013). Social Psychology (Second ed.). Psychology Press. p. 89. ISBN   9781135660406.
  4. 1 2 3 Snyder, Mark; Haugen, Julie A. (September 1995). "Why Does Behavioral Confirmation Occur? A Functional Perspective on the Role of the Target". Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin . 21 (9): 963–974. doi:10.1177/0146167295219010. S2CID   143892339.
  5. ↑ McDonald, W. T.; Toussaint, L. L. (2003). "Questioning the Generality of Behavioral Confirmation to Gender Role Stereotypes: Does Social Status Produce Self-Verification?". Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis. 2 (1).
  6. 1 2 Snyder, Mark; Haugen, Julie A. (1994). "Why Does Behavioral Confirmation Occur? A Functional Perspective on the Role of the Perceiver". Journal of Experimental Social Psychology . 30 (3): 218–246. doi:10.1006/jesp.1994.1011.
  7. ↑ Snyder, Mark; Berschied, Ellen; Decker, Elizabeth Tanke (1977). "Social Perception and Interpersonal Behavior: On the Self-fulfilling Nature of Social Stereotypes" (PDF). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . 35 (9): 663. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.35.9.656 . Retrieved 15 July 2015.
  8. ↑ Chen, Mark; Bargh, John A. (1997). "Nonconscious Behavioral Confirmation Processes: The Self-Fulfilling Consequences of Automatic Stereotype Activation" (PDF). Journal of Experimental Psychology . 33 (5): 546. doi:10.1006/jesp.1997.1329. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-05-22. Retrieved 15 July 2015.
  9. ↑ Heatherton, Todd F. (2003). The Social Psychology of Stigma. New York, NY: The Guilford Press. p. 382. ISBN   978-1572309425.
  10. ↑ Rotenberg, Ken J.; Gruman, Jamie A.; Ariganello, Mellisa (June 2002). "Behavioral Confirmation of the Loneliness Stereotype". Basic and Applied Social Psychology . 24 (2): 81–89. doi:10.1207/S15324834BASP2402_1. S2CID   145647203.
  11. ↑ Jussim, Lee; Eccles, Jacquelynne; Madon, Stephanie (1996). Social perceptions, stereotypes, and teacher expectations, accuracy and the quest for the powerful self-fulfilling prophecy (PDF). Vol. 28. p. 285. doi:10.1016/s0065-2601(08)60240-3. ISBN   9780120152285. Archived from the original (PDF) on 18 September 2017. Retrieved 22 July 2015.{{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
  12. ↑ Bargh, John A.; Gollwitzer, Peter M.; Lee-Chai, Annette; Barndollar, Kimberly; Trotschel, Roman (2001). "The Automated Will: Nonconscious Activation and Pursuit of Behavioral Goals" (PDF). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 81 (6): 1024. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.81.6.1014. PMC   3005626 . PMID   11761304 . Retrieved 22 July 2015.
  13. ↑ Fiske, Susan T.; Gilbert, Daniel T.; Lindzey, Gardner (2010). Handbook of Social Psychology (5 ed.). Canada: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. p.  1061. ISBN   978-0470137475.
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