ABSTRACT
Social psychology has a longstanding consensus that social perception is dominated by self-fulfilling prophecy, error and bias. The self-fulfilling and biasing effects of expectancies became a major area of research after the publication of the famous and controversial Pygmalion study. Cognitive biases do sometimes lead to expectancy confirmation and expectancies do sometimes lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. The biasing effects of expectations and stereotypes on person perception hover barely above zero, making stereotype and expectancy biases one of the smallest effects in a field characterized by generally modest effects. Many social perceptions, including social stereotypes, are often more heavily based on social reality than they distort or create such realities. Nonetheless, the big picture remains intact: in sharp contrast to decades of claims about stereotype inaccuracy, the actual data shows that stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology.
