ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the implications of self-fulfilling prophecies and perceptions of causes research for performance evaluation. It discusses self-fulfilling prophecies and perceived cause on the grounds that I.-O. psychologists may be less familiar with these areas of social-psychological research than the others. Social-psychological studies of stereotypes, impression formation, implicit personality theory, attributional processes, schema formation, sampling errors, and decision making as they relate to the study of cognitive processes have entered the mainstream of social-psychological research. The focus of self-fulfilling prophecies and perceptions of cause was intended to be illustrative of research exploring the relationships among social-perception variables, attribution, and social interaction in order to better understand sources of self-perpetuating attributional efforts that may affect the evaluation process. The self-fulfilling prophecy involves a process by which expectancies held by a perceiver about a target actually influence the target's behavior in ways that confirm the perceiver's expectancy.
