[1] Following Weston's work, Bob Jickling, et al. in Environmental Education, Ethics, and Action (United Nations Education Program (UNEP), 2006) wrote: According to Thomas Schelling’s classic (1978) treatment, the term “self-fulfilling prophecy” originally referred to a process in which a negative but quite possibly baseless expectation or prediction generates a feedback loop that ends by producing exactly the expected negative result: the diminution or defeat of something originally stable and seemingly solid.
The term has since broadened greatly, however, to include any self-augmenting expectation, prediction, or disposition, many of which can also have positive effects.
A 1996 article by philosopher Anthony Weston refocused on part of what Schelling described as the original denotation of “self-fulfilling prophecy” using the more specific term “self-validating reduction”.
For example, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass pointed out that Among many other possible examples are the Nazi concentration camps, designed to destroy the inmates' very humanity and thus to validate the Nazis’ prejudices and make systematic murder possible; and the ways in which prejudiced persons, convinced of (say) a co-worker's incapacity or inequality, are likely to reduce their co-workers to uncooperative antagonists: missing their own contribution to the process, they will then naturally conclude that their co-workers – not themselves – are incapable of good work.
The ecological critic Paul Shepard noted that land can be reduced in self-validating ways as well, as when Isaiah commands Israel to “tear down the [pagan] altars, break their images, cut down their groves” – so that it becomes true, as it may not have been initially, that only the other world, beyond nature, is truly sacred.