Motivational Approaches to Expectancy Confirmation

For some time now, social, per sonality, and cognitive psychologists have been interested in how our in terpersonal expectations affect our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. A provocative finding in this research suggests that people often act in ways that preferentially confirm their expectations of others. Specifically, an individual who holds some ex pectation (who is generally referred to as a perceiver) about some other person (who is generally referred to as a target), through the course of their interaction, will often form ex pectancy-confirming impressions of the target (a phenomenon referred to as perceptual confirmation) and elicit expectancy-confirming behav ior from the target (a phenomenon referred to as behavioral confirma tion). Thus, expecting Jody to be a warm and friendly person, I may elicit warm and friendly behavior from her and form similar impres sions of her. This expectancy confir mation is the essence of Merton's