Don't judge prematurely All of us tend to make premature and often superficial judgments about people. Race, gender, economic status, and political affiliation are just some of the areas where we negatively label others. And, all too often, our expectations come true. The people turn out to be just as unfriendly, self-centered, ignorant, or dishonest as we imagined them to be. Rosenthal's theory suggests that we might be partly to blame.
Negative expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies.
It can happen with our own children. Wanting to protect them from failure, we focus exclusively on their failures, communicating expectations of failure to them. For the last three years I have taught freshman writing students on the college campus. One of my primary goals each semester is to get kids to believe in their own ideas and their own ability to, with training and hard work, express those ideas in clear, persuasive prose. And the best way to do this is something that actually comes quite easily for me.