Daily Inspiration Quote by Naomi Weisstein

Expectations aren’t just predictions in Naomi Weisstein’s line; they’re instructions. Coming from a psychologist with one foot in lab culture and the other in feminist critique, the sentence quietly indicts the supposedly neutral observer. It’s a warning that “human nature” often shows up wearing the clothes we hand it.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “In some extremely important ways” is a measured hedge that lands like a dare: she’s not claiming people are infinitely malleable, she’s pointing to the high-stakes domains where expectation becomes destiny - classrooms, clinics, workplaces, courtrooms. “Or at least they behave” is the tell. Weisstein separates essence from performance, then argues that performance is what institutions reward, punish, and record. If you expect a student to be brilliant, you give them air and feedback; if you expect them to be trouble, you police their tone. The behavior you anticipated arrives on schedule, and you call it proof.

The subtext is methodological and political. Psychology, especially mid-century psychology, loved clean categories: masculine/feminine, normal/deviant, gifted/deficient. Weisstein’s career is threaded through the backlash against that: experiments that smuggled bias in as “common sense,” diagnoses that mirrored social control, and research that treated women’s anger or ambition as pathology. Her sentence sketches the mechanism behind the harm: expectations don’t merely reflect reality, they manufacture it - then science, or authority, misrecognizes the manufactured product as an objective finding.

It’s also a moral demand. If people become what we expect, we’re accountable for the futures our expectations make plausible.