Spontaneous reasoning about the phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecies. Part III

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the first and second parts, I discussed the connections between certain phenomena in society and in the life of one person, which are directly related to the phenomenon of self-fulfilling predictions. Now let's look at some of the other manifestations of the forces that underlie such predictions. I will continue to argue according to the principle of "thinking out loud", that is, I start the article, not knowing how it will end in advance and what I should write in general - just a stream of thoughts with a small revision.

Everyone probably knows such a joke that young specialists are not hired because they have no work experience. A natural question arises: how can they get work experience if they are not hired? In this case, we have nothing more than a self-fulfilling vicious circle that has the same roots as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Another example, a mother says to a child “do not come near the water until you learn how to swim”, or, for example, a girl says: “I don’t meet strangers”. It is clear that this looks more like jokes, but they have the same meaning.

Now about the serious things. Robert Merton, one of the popularizers of this phenomenon, in one of his articles (Self-fulfilling prophecy (Thomas's theorem)), among other things, wrote about the attitudes of white people towards blacks, about why it was in America in the middle of the last century that way, for example, why they were not hired for good jobs and where ethnic and racial prejudices came from. Read this article; if we briefly retell one of her thoughts (and there are a lot of them there), then the essence is as follows. Blacks did not receive enough education and work experience, but why? Because their ability was not appreciated enough, because everyone knew that blacks did not know how to do anything in which whites were strong (for example, in trade). Here is a vicious circle: people do not get enough experience, because everyone considers them underdeveloped, although this "underdevelopment" is a consequence of the fact that he does not get experience. This is not only a vicious circle, but also the permutation of cause and effect, which I talked about earlier. In general, Merton argues that such processes are a direct consequence of the phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecy as a basic social process.

But let's move away from strict sociology and see what we see in reality. In reality, we see that there is a way out of any such vicious circle. Inexperienced people still get a job, the child nevertheless comes to the water and learns to swim, the girl nevertheless finds new acquaintances, and blacks have become a full-fledged part of the Western world. Well, since such self-contained problems have a solution, then any problem of a self-fulfilling prophecy has a solution.

In order to lead the reader to the thought of a possible solution, I will recall an old anecdote (I will copy it from the Internet, it has been published in many places):

Once Henry Kissinger was curious:

- What is shuttle diplomacy?

Kissinger replied:

- O! This is a fail-safe Jewish way! I show by example how shuttle diplomacy works. Let's say you want to marry Rockefeller's daughter for a simple guy from a Siberian village.

- Is it possible?

- It's pretty simple. I go to a Russian village, meet a healthy guy there and ask:

- Do you want to marry an American Jewish woman?

He told me:

- Why the hell ?! There are enough girls of our own here.

I told him:

- But she is the daughter of the billionaire Rockefeller!

He:

- O! Then it changes things …

Then I go to Switzerland for a meeting of the bank's board and ask the question:

- Would you like to have a Siberian peasant president?

- Why do we need a Siberian man? - they are surprised at me at the bank.

- So he will be Rockefeller's son-in-law?

- O! Well this, of course, changes things!

After that I go home to Rockefeller and ask:

- Do you want to have a son-in-law of a Russian peasant?

He told me:

- What do you suggest? Our family has always had only financiers!

I told him:

- So he will also be the president of the board of the Swiss Bank!

He:

- O! This changes things! Suzy! Come on here. Friend Kissinger found you a great fiancé. This is the President of the Swiss Bank!

Suzy:

- Fu … All these financiers are impotent and dead!

And I told her:

- Yes! But this one is a hefty Siberian man!

She:

- Ltd! This changes things!

What do we see? Some prediction is given, which at the time of its presentation is not necessarily reliable at all. It turns out that we are kind of "borrowing". Then a chain of events is built from this prediction, leading to the truth of the original prediction - "we repay the debt." However, in the process of this cycle itself, we not only took and paid off the debt, but also received benefits. That is, you can compare it with a certain loan in a bank (it does not matter, with or without interest) - we take it to do some business, and then give it back, completing this business and getting the desired result both for ourselves and for repaying the debt. …

Recalling the old ancient saying "they knock out a wedge with a wedge" or "there is no trick against a crowbar if there is no other crowbar", the thinking reader has already realized that in the methodology of such "closings" one can find one of the options for dealing with self-fulfilling prophecies, since they have one and the same sociological root.

This root is Thomas's theorem, which states that "If people define situations as real, then they are real in their consequences" or, to reformulate it a little, "the definition of a social situation is part of this situation."

Thus, if we find ourselves in a vicious circle of self-fulfilling prophecy, we can leave it in the same way as we entered it - we need to show will and cancel the initial false premise with which everything began, as if refusing to do the actions that we did. only because they believed the prophecy to be true. Roughly the same is said by R. Merton in the article mentioned above:

The application of Thomas' theorem also shows that the tragic, often even vicious circle of self-fulfilling prophecies can be broken. It is necessary to abandon the initial definition of the situation that triggers the roundabout. And when the original assumption is called into question and a new definition of the situation is introduced, the subsequent development of events refutes the assumption. And then belief ceases to define reality.

You can try to define the situation in your own way, start another chain of actions leading to the desired result, as if creating your own prophecy as opposed to the one we want to get out of. But here you need to be careful: creating your own counter prophecy instead of the original one can just launch the mechanism of its [initial] implementation. Why? Because you started to act, accepting the original prophecy as the truth, which is evidenced by the very fact of fighting against it.

Unfortunately, R. Merton does not answer a number of other important questions. After all, the proposed solution may (and even then not always) be suitable for one person. And how to convince a group of people who do not know each other that it is necessary to get out of the vicious circle? How could you explain to the bank's depositors that the rumors of bankruptcy were a lie and that if everyone ran to take the money, the bank would really go bankrupt? How to explain to the crowd that it itself is going to what it opposes?

The answer to these questions remains to be seen. For now, I need the reader to understand that such phenomena are the basis of almost all social processes, and, therefore, it is these phenomena that are closed on themselves that constitute the foundation of the new science of Social forestry.