Carl Word and his colleagues (1974) found that white college students who were assumed to already hold prejudiced attitudes toward blacks sat further away, conducted briefer interviews, and made more speech errors when interviewing black students. Which of the following constructs most readily explains the results from this study?

a. social facilitation
b. group polarization
c. stereotype threat
d. self-fulfilling prophecies

d. self-fulfilling prophecies                                                                

Explanation:

Self-fulfilling prophecy: In social psychology, the term "self-fulfilling prophecy" is described as a condition or situation in which an individual tends to expects or predicts something, and hence this expectation or predictions turns out to be true just because he or she believes that it will happen and then the person's resulting behavior would align to complete or fulfill the former beliefs. However, the given scenario signifies that an individual's beliefs tend to influence his or her actions.  

In the question above, the given statement represents the self-fulfilling prophecies.

the rebels’ chances of victory at lexington & concord were fairly slim, given the fact that most of them very untrained and they were up against the world's greatest military force.