Behavioral confirmation in social interaction: From social perception to social reality

A perceiver’s actions, although based upon initially erroneous beliefs about a target individual may channel social interaction in ways that cause the behavior of the target to confirm the perceiver’s beliefs. To chart this process of behavioral confirmation, we observed successive interactions between one target and two perceivers. In the first interaction, targets who interacted with perceivers who anticipated hostile partners displayed greater behavioral hostility than targets whose perceivers expected nonhostile partners. Only when targets regarded their actions as reflections of personal dispositions did these behavioral differences in hostility persevere into their subsequent interactions with naive perceivers who had no prior knowledge about them. Theoretical implications of the behavioral confirmation construct for social perception processes are discussed. If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. W. I. Thomas It has been fashionable for many years to view deviance as a process of social definition and social creation (e.g., Becker, 1963; Schur, 1971; Tannenbaum, 1938). The essence of this “labeling ” orientation is that “... social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitute deviance.... ” (Becker, 1963, p. 9). Of critical importance to this process is the influence of labels on the dynamics of social interaction. Having once been tagged with a label that implies deviance, one’s behavioral options may be constrained in ways that actually force one to become deviant. Consider the observations of Tannenbaum on the social creation of crime and delinquency