"A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior."[1]
This means that if you believe that something will happen, it probably will. For example, if a teacher tells a student they are going to fail at their classes, the fear that it brings will make the prophecy more likely to happen. This was credited by sociologist Robert K Merton in his book Sociological Theory and Social Structure.
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