Self-validating reduction

A self-validating reduction is kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of which the result is a dramatic reduction in a person, group, or natural being. This term was coined by Anthony Weston and used in his book Back to Earth in 1994. 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 standard example is a run on an initially solvent bank that can accelerate into a panic and drive the bank into bankruptcy simply because very few banks, however well-managed, can cash out large numbers of depositors upon unexpected demand. The term has since broadened greatly, however, to include any self-augmenting expectation, prediction, or disposition, many of which can also have positive effects. High self-esteem, however ill-founded, may produce more confident and capable acts, hence "fulfilling" itself. Other interpersonal expectations such as predictions of student success, initially quite baseless, can produce student success through subtly altering the expectations of their teachers.

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”. The "reduction" is an actual change – some kind of deprivation, loss, or diminution – not merely a "prophecy" in the sense of an attitude change in another person or society at large; and a change that comes to justify or "validate" a changed judgment of the person changed or reduced, specifically by ignoring the actual cause of the reduction and attributing it instead to the essential character of the reduced person(s) instead.

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.

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