自证预言（又称「自我应验预言」），是由美国社会学家罗伯特·金·莫顿提出的一种社会心理学现象，是指人们先入为主的判断，无论其正确与否，都将或多或少的影响到人们的行为，以至于这个判断最后真的实现。通俗的说，自证预言就是我们总会在不经意间使我们自己的预言成为现实。

信念和行为之间的正反馈被认为是自我应验预言成真的主要原因。虽然此类预言的例子可以一直追溯到古希腊和古印度时期的文学作品，然而「自证预言」这个名称直到20世纪才由著名社会学家罗伯特·金·莫顿提出，并对它的结构和推论作了比较系统化的定义。莫顿在他的著作《社会理论和社会结构》中对自我应验预言作了如下阐述：

A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior. Although examples of such prophecies can be found in literature as far back as ancient Greece and ancient India, it is 20th-century sociologist Robert K. Merton who is credited with coining the expression "self-fulfilling prophecy" and formalizing its structure and consequences. In his 1948 article Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Merton defines it in the following terms: