The Looping Effect and Expectations

Times change, and so do people. People in trouble are not more constant than anyone else. But there is more to the change in the lifestyle of multiples than the passage of time. We tend to behave in ways that are expected of us, especially by authority figures -- doctors, for example. Some physicians had multiples among their patients in the 1840s, but their picture of the disorder was very different from the one that is common in the 1990s. The doctors’ vision was different because the patients were different; but the patients were different because the doctors’ expectations were different. That is an example of a very general phenomenon: the looping effect of human kinds. People classified in certain ways tend to conform or grow into the ways they are described; but they also evolve in their own ways, so that the classifications and descriptions have to be constantly revised.

- Hacking, I. 1995. Pg 21. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Science of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press