Self-fulfilling prophecies

I took Professor Nick Epley's class this summer.  The class is titled Managing in Organizations but I think a more appropriate title might be The Psychology of Business, because it was essentially a psychology class.  We spent a great deal of time thinking about the various factors at play when managing people.  In order to successfully manage others, whether they are competitors or co-workers, you must be able to understand thoughts, feelings, attitudes, motivations, and determinants of behavior.  Unfortunately, this isn't so easy because our human intuition is often misguided.

I was able to take away many key learnings from each class session and was able to immediately apply some of these lessons after a recent discussion I had with my father.

In 2003, my father founded a private elementary school in East St Louis, Illinois. The city is well-known in the area to have sky-high crime rates and many residents live below the poverty line. 100% of his students and six of seven teachers are African-American. A recent discussion with my dad revealed some interesting examples of bias and potential self-fulfilling prophecies within the school. 

During a faculty meeting last month, they were discussing the students’ performance on the standardized tests that had been administered. The students had performed on par with regard to the other test takers across the nation. One of the teachers commented that “this is great news considering that our students are below-average!” She was implying that, because many of these students came from broken homes and were very poor, they were below average in comparison to the average student in the U.S. My dad was quick to correct her by reminding her that the students in their school were just as capable of learning and performing well as other students in the US regardless of their background. It seems that this teacher’s internal biases may have briefly surfaced during the meeting. 

Another example arose a few weeks later. In an effort to impress upon the students the importance of these standardized tests, the teachers in the higher grades were to go over a college admission application with the students to show them that these tests matter because someday they would be required to report SAT scores. When my dad followed up with one of the teachers to see how the college application discussion went, she said: “Well, I decided to go a different route. I thought it would be more realistic to go over a QuikTrip (the local gas station) application.” My dad was shocked and explained to her that this was potentially creating a self-fulfilling prophecy for the kids. In addition to creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, this teacher’s internal biases and expectations for the students also surfaced.