ABSTRACT
The dynamics of the self-fulfilling prophecy typically involve behavioral confirmation, which Darley and Fazio described as a sequence that begins when a perceiver forms an expectation about a person, then acts toward that person based on the expectation. Surveying the field in the mid-1970s, they noticed that much of the theorizing done by cognitively oriented social psychologists left the individual about whom they were theorizing lost in thought. Investigators had learned a lot about the machinery of social cognition. Snyder and Swann demonstrated a similar dynamic in a study involving conversations between strangers. People are not always the same in different situations; they are not as trait-like as we imagine. Extroverts have their solitary days, and introverts occasionally come out of their shells. The so-called fundamental attribution error involves unjustifiably attributing a persons behaviors to personality traits when situational constraints explain them better.
