Rosenthal and Jacobson carried out a famous study on the subject of teacher labelling and its impact on pupils. Their findings supported the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby if teachers labelled pupils as high-flyers or unusually gifted, their attainment came to reflect that label (and, theoretically, the opposite would also be true, with negative labels). Because labelling theory is an interactionist theory, there is no suggestion that a self-fulfilling prophecy is inevitable: people could also choose to reject the label.