Page 51 - Masala E-magazine Vol 9 Issue 6 Junel - July 2018

Dadi placed a prophecy on me

“[Insert your name] badi hoshiyaar hain”

Has your grandmother called you clever at many points in your life, especially in front of her friends?
Every time that happens to me, I want to melt into the fl oor from the sudden unwanted attention.
Hoshiyaar, meaning smart, can also be replaced with many other favourable adjectives, such as
soni/sona (good looking) and sayani/sayana (clever).

Research reveals that there is a strong chance that your dadi’s unconditional beliefs about you,
however misleading they may be, is the reason you mirror those qualities today. The self-fulfi lling
prophecy is a psychological concept that states that we eventually conform to how people around
us perceive us. We mould ourselves to their expectations, ultimately fulfi lling a prophecy.

Now let me explain further. G. Jahoda, in a very classic study titled
‘A Note on Ashanti Names and their Relationship to Personality’
conducted in 1954, described how boys of the Ashanti tribe in
Ghana showcased temperaments based on society’s expectations.
Ashanti people named boys depending on the day they were born,
and each day was linked to a particular disposition. For example,
those born on Monday were thought to have quiet and tranquil
personalities and were called ‘Kwadwo’. Boys that were born on
Wednesday, on the other hand, were named ‘Kwadku’ and were
expected to be aggressive, impulsive and provocative.

When Jahoda analysed arrest rates of the tribe, he found that there
were signifi cantly more males called ‘Kwadku’ than those called
‘Kwadwo’. An explanation is the self-fulfi lling prophecy, meaning that
the people around them may have treated the boys differently based
on their expectations of them, and so they conformed accordingly.
Young boys from the
Ashanti tribe in Ghana

Can we really attribute our
behaviours to the prophecy?

Like with any theory, there is opposing research to contradict
the self-fulfilling prophecy i.e. the use of correlations, the
fact that we are sometimes motivated to prove others’
expectations of us wrong or how there are other variables
that could have explained the results. However, this prophecy
has been used to explain different behaviours in various
contexts, including an individual’s grades, the drinking
behaviour of an entire society, and so on. It’s not just our
grandmothers’ expectations and descriptions of us that
may determine our behaviours, but rather it is everyone’s.
However, grandmothers are the ones that candidly express
their feelings of us. They, over your parents, will give you
compliments. Thus, the next time your grandmother praises
you, pay attention and absorb her words, regardless of how
embarrassed you are. They may affect you more than you
know, and eventually you might prove her right.

51
www.masalathai.com