Self‐Monitoring and Susceptibility to the Influence of Self‐Prophecy

Having people predict whether they will perform a socially normative behavior increases their probability of performing that target action. Recent empirical evi-dence supports a dissonance-based theoretical explanation for this self-prophecy effect. While the effect is robust, few boundary conditions have been identified. We report two experiments within the dissonance paradigm providing theory-rel-evant evidence for the moderating effects of self-monitoring on people’s suscep-tibility to self-prophecy. In particular, low self-monitors are more likely than high self-monitors to be influenced by self-prediction regarding normative behaviors. Implications for theory and the practice of social influence are provided. Asking people to make a self-prediction regarding anormative behavior influences the performance of that behavior in the future. Since its introduction by Sherman (1980), this self-prophecy effect has been documented across a wide variety of normative contexts, with demon-strated increases in performing socially desirable actions such as recycling aluminum cans and voting in an election and decreases in undesirable behaviors such as cheating on a take-home exam and implicit gender stereotyping (for a review, see Spangenberg et al. 2003). The wide variety of effects and consistently moderate effect sizes (Spangenberg and Greenwald 1999) reported in prior research clearly sug-gest promise for the consistent, wide-scale application of self-prediction to the benefit of society. While demonstrations of the self-prophecy phenomenon have been reported in the literature during the past several years, only recently has evidence begun to accrue regarding theoretical explication for the effect and under what con-ditions it manifests. Various theoretical mechanisms have been proposed for the effects of behavioral self-prediction, including script evocation and impression management (Sherman 1980), cognitive dissonance (Spangenberg 1997; Spangenberg and Greenwald 1999), attitude accessibility