More than any other individual, Robert Rosenthal has put the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy on the research agenda of the psychological community. Following his lead, other psychologists have moved the self-fulfilling prophecy from the psychological agenda to the national social policy agenda, drawing attention to the manifold implications that the existence of self-fulfilling prophecies has for interactional processes in legal, educational, organizational, and other social settings.

Putting an issue on such diverse agendas is no mean feat, and it is worth tracing how Rosenthal accomplished this. This answer is a sobering one; it required not only an incisive grasp of an important concept, but an incredibly large commitment of disciplined experimental energy over a period of years.

Nor can one argue that Rosenthal chose the maximally ingratiating and tactful way to introduce the construct of self-fulfilling prophecies to the psychological research community. In the 1960s, word swept the research community that an individual from the Dakotas, and then from Harvard, was demonstrating experimenter bias effects that fundamentally called into question the interpretations of the results of many experiments. We suspect that the general reaction of the research community was similar to the reactions of the corners of the community that the first author observed: initial resistance, later annoyed acceptance of the implications for the design of research, and still later the realization that an extremely general human phenomenon had been illuminated.