If you’ve read enough of my blog, you’ve probably seen me write about the significance – both good and bad – of self-fulfilling prophecies. Every day, I see how they impact my own thinking and outlook on the world – from how much I like my outfit to how productive I am during the workday.
More so, however, it’s even easier for me to see how they affect my friends and their lives because I find myself being a source of advice, both personally and professional for so many of them. I see, almost daily, how the creation of self-fulfilling prophecies bolsters or hinders their abilities to find jobs they like or excel at the ones they have, get into relationships they value or get out of the ones they don’t, and live life to the fullest.
I don’t have some prescriptive thought on the matter, but I did want to share the majority of the definition. I think knowing the meaning of a self-fulfilling prophecy is half the battle in better understanding their purpose. Knowing their purpose may enable people to turn it from something that can be a negative contributor to one’s life into something that is milked for goodness.
People tend to find what they are looking for. They create what they seek. So, by knowing what the word’s “originator” Robert Merton was describing when he coined the term, I hope my friends and others are able to look for bigger and better things for themselves and create a sea of opportunities rather than obstacles.
[Straight from Wikipedia:]
A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior. Although examples of such prophecies can be found in literature as far back as ancient Greece and ancient India, it is 20th-century sociologist Robert K. Merton who is credited with coining the expression "self-fulfilling prophecy" and formalizing its structure and consequences. In his book Social Theory and Social Structure, Merton defines self-fulfilling prophecy in the following terms: e.g. when Roxanna falsely believes her marriage will fail, her fears of such failure actually cause the marriage to fail.
The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior, which makes the original false conception come 'true'. This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning. In other words, a prophecy declared as truth when it is actually false may sufficiently influence people, either through fear or logical confusion, so that their reactions ultimately fulfill the once-false prophecy.
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