Assignment 5: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

While reading David Newman's, Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life, my favorite chapter so far has definitely been chapter 3; Building Reality: The Social Construction of Knowledge. This chapter was, at first, a little hard for me to wrap my head around. It  forced me to think about my own reality, and how it has become what it is. Truths and realities are constantly changing along with culture and historical context, and can be different for everyone. 

The most intriguing part of the chapter for me was the part on self-fulfilling prophecies. A self-fulfilling prophecy is an assumption or a prediction that, purely as a result of having been made, causes the expected event to occur and thus confirms the prophecy's own "accuracy" (Newman 64). In other words, these are cultural beliefs that come true simply because you believe it is true.


 I believe this is a very important concept for people to be aware of.  I really like this concept, because I am a huge believer that the attitude, energy, and intention you put out into the world, is what comes back to you, and is therefore what makes up your reality. Self fulfilling prophecies can have both positive and negative outcomes depending on the truths you have created within your own thoughts. Thoughts are incredibly powerful forces in the outcome of any situation. 

In the Building Reality chapter, Newman demonstrates how powerful self-fulfilling prophecies can be by using the examples of placebos and nocebos. The "nocebo effect" is the inverse of the placebo effect where people create expectations that make people worse. I was truly blown away by the poison ivy experiment explained in the book. Here is a recap: the experimenters rubbed one of their arms with a harmless leaf and told them with poison ivy and rubbed the other arm with poison ivy and told them it was a harmless leaf. Incredibly, all thirteen broke out in a rash where the harmless leaf had touched their skin, and only two reacted to the real poison ivy leaves. Amazingly, their preconceived expectations caused a physical reaction where there should not have been one and stopped the real reaction from happening. If this does not prove how powerful the mind is, I don't know what does. This really makes you think, how much of what happens in life is simply your mind creating it. 

Also, while reading this chapter I started to think about my own self-fulfilling prophecies. One example of how I used my attitude, expectations, and thoughts to create a better outcome for myself was in my high school pre-calc class. I had been listening to people complain about how horrible and difficult this class was for an entire semester. When I looked at my schedule and saw the words Pre-Calculus on it, my stomach dropped and I felt a rush of nervousness and dread as I tried to picture myself surviving the next few months. After a couple days of drowning in my own negative thoughts, I made what I now know to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I swore to myself that I would go into the class with a positive attitude, and maintain it throughout the course of the class, and that is what I did. It was no always easy to think positive thoughts about complicated formulas and my monotone teacher, but the more I practiced, the easier it became. Consequently, I actually ended up understanding and really enjoying the class in the end. Once I saw that positivity brought me success, I started going into all of my classes with the same attitude, and I actually ended up significantly improving my grades. This proved to me that going into things with a good attitude truly does make for a better experience.

Reading this chapter has definitely made me pay more attention to my own outlook on life and the expectations I set for myself. There is no denying that thoughts, attitudes, preconceived expectations and intentions create the world we see around us, and recognizing this can be life changing.

Works Cited:
Newman, David (2012). Sociology:Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life: 9th Edition. SAGE Publications.