Henry Ford famously wrote, “whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” And he was only just scratching the surface. The more apt sentiment is “perception is reality”, however it’s not limited to what one sees, it’s what one expects to see.
The notion of the self fulfilling prophecy (SFP) is analogized nicely in the ‘wood eye’ story. Our prophecies are not limited to our areas of high sensitivity, but span areas of vulnerability, hurt, fear, uncertainty, and anywhere else the ego seeks predictive assurance to lessen exposure to potential pain.
The SFP is a very sophisticated trick. The ego, always protective of our fragility and desire to avoid pain, attempts to figure out a cause for every painful effect we experience. I got cut off by an Asian driver, so Asian drivers are dangerous and avoiding them provides me greater safety. I got my heart broken by a blonde, so blondes are dangerous and avoiding them provides me greater safety. This impoverished form of thinking is obviously illogical, but we all create these stereotypes and hold on to them dearly. Why? Because humans are born fearful. Nobel winners Kahneman and Tversky proved that humans favour fearful thinking over productive thinking, so we’re just wired this way. But that doesn’t mean we need to listen to that silly logic.
The SFP is our prediction of what will happen based on our past experiences and the unconscious bias we have formed. Countless people carry these SFPs into new relationships, as past relationships are sources of hurt and future relationships are sources of vulnerability. So we enter into relationships with that hidden SFP that takes the form of reservation, caution, holding back, or snippy responses to things that didn’t actually happen. It looks at clues and forms of evidence to confirm what we suspected all along – this new person is evil, crazy, probably has a secret life that is intolerable. Okay that’s perhaps a little extreme, but the SFP takes the same approach. You are simply trying to falsify the positive attributes so that you can uncover the truth. Your truth. And then you have once again proven yourself a predictive genius and Sherlock Holmes contemporary.
What’s really happening is that you are not truly interacting with this person. You are interacting with a mental concoction of who this person is, and irrespective of what this person does in real life, your mental interactions, and your detached and suspicious behaviour, will craft the prophecy that you knew all along. And this is why people can give up. Not all _________ (insert group here) are bad. You make them bad by experiencing these things only in your mind, and sabotaging them in real life, and you create the circumstances that lead you to exactly what you predicted. And when seen from the outside, it’s pretty darn foolish to watch.
In another blog I spoke about our need to unadapt, which is to dismantle the psychological negotiations we have brought into existence to avoid pain and achieve more predictably enjoyable outcomes. Here I am saying we need to do the same for our faulty thinking. We need to dismantle all our stereotypes and beliefs so that whatever we encounter in life can be experienced in life and not just in our heads. Doing this exposes us to potential hurt, and our egos flex to avoid this, but the prize is too great to succumb to this fate. The gift of life is to enjoy all that is life; it is not a gift to hide from life and live in our heads.
