What you expect is what you get: The "Pygmalion Effect"

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"Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're right."
-Henry Ford

A couple of Fridays ago I posted a video about teacher who took her third grade class through an activity designed to help them learn about prejudice. When the students were told by their teacher that people with a certain eye color were smarter and better all around, they came to believe it and act in accordance. In the comments to this post, a reader noted that this video reminded him of the famous study by Rosenthal and Jacobson (1966) testing something they'd termed the “Pygmalion effect,” and so I thought I'd share that study with you today.

The Pygmalion effect? If you are not a fan of Eliza Doolittle and My Fair Lady, you might think this effect sounds like a medical condition that occurs after too much sun exposure (or is that just me?), but it’s not. What we’re talking about here is a simple case of self self-fulfilling prophecies (which Juli first wrote about here). Rosenthal and Jacobson were interested in the role of teacher expectancies in learning. What exactly does this mean? Imagine that a third grade teacher starts in the fall with a new class of students, a few of which had older sibling who passed through her class in previous years. She knows that those siblings were star students, and expects the younger siblings will also perform well. She might also talk with some of the second grade teachers who had had some of her students the previous year, and get all kinds of insider information about which students were top performers, and which straggled behind. Now let’s fast forward to the end of the year. Not surprisingly, the students whom the teacher had expected to do well met her expectations, and the stragglers continued to straggle behind. Did those star students perform well because they were smarter than the rest, as indicated by their siblings’ success and the reports of their second grade teachers? Or could it have been a much more sinister story - that they did so well simply because their teachers expected them to do well? This is exactly what Rosenthal and Jacobson wanted to find out.
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