PSYCH 111 Chapter IV: What You Expect is What You Get
Document Summary
What you expect is what you get, p. 93-100. Our intelligence, our ability to think and reason, and our ability to store and retrieve symbolic representations of our experiences all combine to help make humans different from other animals. Studying these processes is often more difficult than studying outward, observable behaviors, so a great deal of research creativity and ingenuity have been necessary. We are all familiar with the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy. One way of describing this concept is that if we expect something to happen in a certain way, our expectation will tend to make it so. Observers often have specific expectations or biases that may cause them to telegraph unintentional signals to a participant being studied. When behavior results from nothing more than the experimenter"s own biased opinions, the threat to the validity of such psychological experiments are categorized as being affected by the experimenter expectancy effect.
