Based on the short story Harrison Bergeron Do you think people's expectations and treatment of Harrison and his eventual actions

could be considered a self-fulfilling prophecy? Why or why not?

Yes, I believe it could be considered a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Explanation:

Self-fulfilling prophecy is a result of the Pygmalion effect. According to this theory, we are influenced by other people's expectations of us. If people believe we will succeed, for example, we too begin to believe we will succeed. For that reason, we change our behavior, aligning it with the belief, making a self-fulfilling prophecy out of it.

In the short story "Harrison Bergeron", Harrison is a fourteen-year-old who is considered to be above average in a world that does not allow people to be anything but average. Intelligent and/or beautiful people are forced by the government to wear handicappers, so that others won't feel offended or humiliated. Treating Harrison like that - forcing him to wear loads of handicappers - convinces him that he is superior, that he is special, that he deserves to show how wonderful he is to the world. People's expectations of Harrison create a self-fulfilling prophecy. He will now inevitably act as if he were really as handsome and intelligent as others claim him to be.

Harrison appears on TV after escaping from where he was kept. He removes his handicappers and dances with a ballerina, until they are both shot and killed. If Harrison were truly superior, truly exceedingly intelligent, he would have known better than to do that. His actions were not the result of his real intelligence, but of his being treated as being more intelligent than others.