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Popular psychological tests and self‐fulfilling prophecy: An experiment of Japanese female undergraduate students
Author(s) -
Sakamoto Akira,
Miura Shino,
Sakamoto Katsura,
Mori Tsutako
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
asian journal of social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.5
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-839X
pISSN - 1367-2223
DOI - 10.1111/1467-839x.00057
Subject(s) - psychology , test (biology) , extraversion and introversion , social psychology , self fulfilling prophecy , personality , big five personality traits , paleontology , biology
The purpose of this study was to examine whether or not the feedback of the results of popular psychological tests influences human behavior, and to compare the strength of any influence with that of academic psychological tests. We conducted an experiment in which 64 female Japanese subjects took a popular or academic psychological test, and then interacted with a stranger. The subjects who took each test received bogus feedback implying that they were extroverted or introverted. The results showed that subjects who received the extroversion feedback were more interactive with a stranger than those who received the introversion feedback, irrespective of whether they had taken the popular or academic test. This suggests that the feedback of popular psychological tests, like that of academic tests, can influence human behavior and create a self‐fulfilling prophecy. The results also showed that those subjects who took the popular psychological tests reported higher psychological well‐being than those who took the academic tests.