Thursday, February 19, 2009

Habs vs. Pens....

That was an interesting game, started off a real snoozer but picked up in the second. I’m not going ballistic over this loss, these guys are dead tired emotionally and physically, a tough road trip combined with all the drama and bullshit has to take its toll. Rumor has it Kovy is back at practice tomorrow, if that’s the case the media will have a field day. I was reading comments tonight on Mike Boone’s live blog on Habsinsideout, maybe a name change should be in order "Fans behaving badly" or "The View from the Outhouse" comes to mind. All that negativity could single handedly bring down the team, that blog is an excellent example of self-fulfilling prophecies


A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself. Although examples of such prophecies can be found in literature as far back as ancient Greece and ancient India, it is 20th-century sociologist Robert K. Merton who is credited with coining the expression "self-fulfilling prophecy" and formalizing its structure and consequences. In his book Social Theory and Social Structure, Merton gives as a feature of the self-fulfilling prophecy:

“ The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behaviour which makes the original false conception come 'true'. This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.[1]

In other words, a prophecy declared as truth when it is actually false may sufficiently influence people, either through fear or logical confusion, so that their reactions ultimately fulfill the once-false prophecy.

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