Research
Psychologist Mark Snyder, and his colleagues (e.g., Skrypnek & Snyder, 1982; Snyder, 1981; Snyder, 1992; Snyder & Swann, 1978; Snyder, Tanke, & Bersheid, 1977), conducted some of the earliest and most-cited studies on behavioural confirmation. Collectively, they produced excellent examples of how a target's behaviour provides behavioural confirmation to a perceiver’s initial (and often erroneous) belief. An excellent example is from their study of the "Physical Attractiveness" stereotype. This study consisted of a number of college men that were induced to believe that they were conversing with an attractive potential female date via tape recorder. While other college men were set up to believe they were conversing with an unattractive potential female date. Through analyzation of the interactions, Snyder and his colleagues had concluded that “those (female targets) who were thought to be physically attractive by their perceivers appeared to the observer judges to manifest greater confidence, greater animation, greater enjoyment of the conversation, and greater liking of their partners” than those women believed by their perceivers to be unattractive.
These findings suggest that human beings, who are the targets of many perceivers in everyday life, may routinely act in ways which are consistent not with our own attitudes, beliefs, or feelings, but rather with the perceptions and stereotypes which others hold of us and our attributes. Hence, seem to suggest that the power of others’ beliefs over our behaviours is extremely strong.
First coined by Mark Snyder (1984), behavioural confirmation, also referred to in literature as ‘self-fulfilling prophecy (e.g. Rosenthal, 1974) and expectancy confirmation (e.g. Darley & Fazio, 1980), is a belief creating phenomenon. Whereby ones beliefs about another, lead them to act in a way that causes the other to confirm that expectation, e.g. one may be told another is cool and aloof, and in turn acts differently when confronting that person, which in turn causes the other to then act cool and aloof (Snyder, 1992; Snyder, Tanke & Berscheid, 1977)
Read more about this topic: Behavioural Confirmation
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