ABSTRACT

When people meet and interact with new acquaintances, they often use expectations about what those other people will be like to guide their interactions. The use of such expectations, often derived from stereotypes and other category-based generalizations, has been demonstrated to influence other people’s behavior such that they may actually confirm erroneous expectations during the interaction (see Snyder & Stukas, 1999, for a review). This phenomenon, in which beliefs appear to function as “self-fulfilling prophecies” producing their own reality, can be broken down into two effects: perceptual confirmation, in which the person who holds an expectation (“the perceiver”) about their partner (“the target”) subjectively believes that their partner has acted consistently with the expectation during the interaction; and behavioral confirmation, in which the target is judged through some unbiased method (usually by the use of independent raters) to have objectively confirmed the perceiver’s expectation with their interaction behavior. Research suggests that these effects are a reliable, though not inevitable, consequence of the use of expectations in social interaction. Our goals here are to consider recent theoretical and empirical advances which suggest that a greater understanding of the contexts in which social interactions occur can shed light on ways in which expectation-relevant interpersonal processes unfold. To do so, we will review past research directly focused on the confirmation of interpersonal expectations in social interaction; in addition, we will extrapolate from research in other domains that can shed some light on such interpersonal processes. Our ultimate aim is to set a course for future research based on past and present indications of the most productive directions.