How Social Expectations Can Predict Our Social Realities

This post was co-authored by David Szwedo and Katie Shiflett, a former undergraduate student at James Madison University.

Source: Photo by Engin Akyurt on Unsplash

Think back to a time when you didn’t want to go somewhere because you thought it was going to be miserably boring, only to go and find your expectations confirmed. Or, after not being particularly thrilled about a job you applied for, went to an interview anyway, and weren’t too surprised to find out it wasn’t a good fit. We can all think of plenty of times in our lives when our expectations about something ended up being right. But what we may not be considering is how our expectations might actually predict what plays out in our lives.

One famous theory about this idea is called the self-fulfilling prophecy. The self-fulfilling prophecy suggests that when we form an expectancy about something, that expectancy colors both how we see it and how we behave towards it. If we expect to fail at something, for example, we might see it as more difficult than it really is and put in less effort to accomplish it. Then, should we fail, we are able to say we knew we would from the beginning. This broad phenomenon shows the general impact that our expectations can have over our realities: that we often allow our expectations to set us up for failures and successes. But is the same true about our relationships? How do the expectations we have about our social worlds influence our relationships with others, especially in the long term?

Researchers at the University of Virginia aimed to answer this question. In their study, using a sample of 184 adolescents, they investigated how negative social expectations in early adolescence might be related to negative consequences in future peer and romantic relationships. Teens first completed a survey when they were 13 asking about their expectations of their social worlds to determine whether the teen had more positive or negative social expectations of others. At ages 18 and 24, the teens were asked to engage in a conversation that featured a disagreement with their best friend or romantic partner. This study found that those who had had more negative social expectations in their early teenage years were likely to receive more hostility from their friends and romantic partners in their later years, showing that people’s negative expectations of their social relationships early on may indeed predict the reality of their social relationships later in life. Importantly, the study controlled for initial levels of hostile attitudes in each individual, suggesting that the results could not be solely explained by each partner simply bringing a hostile attitude to the relationship.

Although there are many things that contribute to the types of relationships we have, this study suggests that the general attitudes we hold about others might set up us for success or difficulty in future relationships. Our attitudes are likely to shape our behavior toward others, and we are likely to receive the same behavior from others that we extend to them. While there are no clear answers as to how exactly or to what degree our expectations influence our realities, there seems to be a connection between a person’s internal social expectations and the social reality that actually occurs. This suggests that changing our expectations about how others will see and behave toward us to be more positive may go a long way toward actually setting us up for more successful relationships in the future.