Consider the classic experiment where male and female participants (who have
never met) were placed in separate rooms. Before they spoke to each other over a
telephone, the men were shown pictures of either an attractive woman (group 1) or
an unattractive woman (group 2). Importantly, the pictures that the men were shown
bore no resemblance to the woman to which they were actually talking.
When judges listened to the woman’s side of the phone conversation (without hearing
anything that the men said to them), they found that women who talked to men from
the first group tended to sound more warm, friendly and flirtatious than women who
had spoken to men from the second group. In this study, which people were most
likely to have created a self-fulfilling prophecy?
