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. Mark Snyder and his colleagues provided a classic experimental demonstration of behavioral confirmation. 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 demonstrated important potential outcomes of stereotypic impressions. The young men's expectations governed their self-presentations, which in turn encouraged females to behave accordingly. Extroverts have their solitary days, and introverts occasionally come out of their shells. The so-called fundamental attribution error involves unjustifiably attributing a person's behaviors to personality traits when situational constraints explain them better.
