Robert King Merton said that not the reality is important, but the way people are imagining

it, and through the power of such belief, the reality is forced to conform to the new definition written by the social actors. Therefore, these false premises carried by society can cause new truths that create a new social reality, influencing peoples behavior. This phenomenon is called self-fulfilling prophecy and its associated with some kind of a social telepathy. Some studies on self-fulfilling prophecies made by Jussim and Fleming in Self-fulfilling Prophecies and the Maintenance of Social Stereotypes: The Role of Diadic Interactions and Social Forces (1996)give some examples: The prejudice of the immoral and dishonest Jewish, that feed the Middle Age anti-Semitism came because of the socio-politic restrictive context: it was forbidden for a Jew to make commercial transactions, therefore they were constrained to break the law, becoming, without their will, exactly like in the imaginary portrait described above. The slaves from America, at the beginning of the 19th century, were thought to be lazy, stupid and superstitious. The society, depriving them of jobs and formation, was condemning them to confirm the stereotype. The education offered the most spectacular and consistent results of the self-fulfilling prophecy through the Pygmalion Effect and the identical mirror effect (Rosenthal, Jacobson, 1986). The symbolism in this psycho-social mechanism is identified by the positive power conferred of a Pygmalion in the Greek mythology, he is the King of Cyprus and a great sculptor who falls in love with its own creation, Galatea and because of his deep love, Aphrodite is convinced to give life to the statue that gives and is rewarded depending on the gift. In other words, in life we get from the other what we expect from him and the power of our own expectations can influence the results. Robert Rosenthal and Leonore Jacobson organized one of the most famous experiments in social psychology applied in education, through a longitudinal study. Thus, the authors informed the professors of a high school that, after rigorous investigations through using intelligence tests - , some of the students of the high school had high IQ scores, and others, just modest scores. At the end of the year, 8 months after the beginning of the study, the IQ of all the students previously tested was measured again. But in fact, the initial announcements of the experimenters were not real, and the scores they declared were distributed randomly. Even though, 78% of the students who were initially called intelligent had a real increase in their IQ with 10 points more until the end of the year, some of them even having a spectacular improvement of 30 points! The openness of the teachers, their positive expectations generated a benefic effect, improving the others dimension of personality in this case, the intelligence. The psychologists noticed how, mostly implicit, teachers paid more attention to the intellectually gifted students, by stimulating them and constantly encouraging them, offering them extra explanations in a word, they got involved more deeply in the relationship, fact that

lead to a response of the students that was convergent with the initial expectations of the ones teaching. Many further studies got to validate the Pygmalion effect through a considerable empirical back-up: a study from Great Britain with 4,300 students, coordinated by Crano and Mellon (1978), or other study in United States who evaluated over 5,000 students (Hart, 1978) proved right the phenomenon. Relying upon these results and investigating over 400 studies on this subject, Robert Rosenthal proposed that 36% of the academic performances are caused mainly because of the positive expectations of the teachers regarding their students! The cognitive mechanism in the self-fulfilling prophecy is explained by this: we see the world through our own prejudices, filtering the information that come to us in such a way to strengthen our own expectations. Then we learn these by heart and after, we explain what is going on around us through this kind of crippled thinking. By this, our expectations create the social reality and, even if when they are not authentic, they end up becoming true. The wrong definition of a situation can be involuntary, by lack of contextual information, or deliberate, generating a social manipulation, obtaining certain benefits. The wrong image about a person will lead to the self-fulfilling prophecy and at a behavioral confirmation. Thus, if we imagine about the other that he is open, friendly, social, we will be kind to him every time we meet him. The response of our friend will be usually convergent with our own expectations: he will try to play the role we created, even if, in his own way, he is more inclined towards introversion. Then we will naturally conclude: Hes exactly how I expected him to be! Of course, we can imagine this scene in its negative version, in which we qualify the other as cold, distant, arrogant, fact that will make him respond to our aggressive attitude aggressively, even if he is usually a meek and generous person, fulfilling again the prophecy. But how can we break the chain of the self-fulfilling prophecy? In the first instance, when our expectations lead to a certain behavior, we will understand that, in most of the situations, the interaction of the social subjects takes place on a basis of minimum knowledge about the other. But when we are strongly motivated to truly know the other, to consider it as a partner in a common project, then the authentic knowledge we have about our partner give us accurate informations that will infirm our initial expectations. In the second instance, most of the time, the target is not aware of the erroneous opinion of the source (for example, the students from Robert Rosenthals experiment didnt know anything about their random IQ classification that shaped the teachers expectations.) It has been observed that if the target becomes aware of these false evaluations, will be motivated to generate tactic of influencing the source to abandon their inadequate expectations (Hilton, Darley, 1985). Therefore, the target-subject is never a passive actor. In the end, even the target has its own prophecies to fulfill.