Audrey Hepburn in a promotional photograph for the film, My Fair Lady (1964) - Public Domain
(The film, My Fair Lady is based on the 1913 George Bernard Shaw play, ‘Pygmalion’)
“When we are led to expect that we are about to meet a pleasant person, our treatment of him at the first meeting may, in fact, make him a more pleasant person. If we are led to expect that we shall encounter an unpleasant person, we may approach him so defensively that we make him into an unpleasant person...It is about interpersonal self-fulfilling prophecies: how one person’s expectation for another person’s behaviour can quite unwittingly become an accurate prediction simply for its having being made.” (1)
Sweeney’s Miracle
In the early 1960s, James Sweeney taught industrial management and psychiatry at Tulane University where he was also responsible for the operation of the Biomedical Computer Centre. James believed that he could teach anybody to become a computer operator. This was a big claim back in the 1960s when operating computers was very specialised work. But Sweeney was sure he could teach even an uneducated person to do this job. So he chose to train George Johnson, a former hospital porter, who was working as a janitor at the computer centre.
Johnson was making a lot of progress when the management of the College decided to intervene. They insisted that he take an IQ test. According to the results of the test, George Johnson should not have been able to type let alone operate a computer and they wanted to replace him. James Sweeney threatened to resign if they tried to stop George’s training. The College administrators relented and both Johnson and Sweeney stayed.
George Johnson not only learned how to operate a computer, he went on to run the main computer room, becoming responsible for training new operators - amongst other things. It turned out that Johnson’s capabilities were more closely related to Sweeney’s expectations than to any so-called objective criteria.
The reasons that people do what is expected of them are complex. However, while subtle – these tiny changes that manifest as a result of expectations, are sometimes enough to set people on a course that is more to do with the expectation than with their original potential – for good or ill.
Pygmalion in the Classroom
The Pygmalion Effect is the name given to a phenomenon that means that we tend to perform to the level that others expect of us. A very interesting study regarding the influence of expectation was conducted in the United States in the1960s, by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson. In the now famous Oak School experiment, Rosenthal and Jacobson demonstrated what they called, the Pygmalion Effect.
In simple terms, the Pygmalion Effect means that when teachers expect students to do well and show intellectual growth, they do; and when teachers don’t have such expectations, performance and growth are not as common. For the purposes of the Oak School experiment, teachers were told that certain students were showing signs of a spurt in intellectual growth and development. The students were chosen at random and the ‘proof’ of their aptitude or potential was fabricated. Nevertheless, at the end of the year, these supposedly ‘smart’ students showed significantly greater gains in intellectual growth than did those in the control group.
We Get What We Expect
The truth is that most of our relationships and interactions are, at some level, self-fulfilling prophecies - we get what we expect. Because, contrary to the notion that we are all doomed to forever be some fixed version of ourselves, as human beings we have the capacity for change and development.
I particularly like how Oscar Wilde described this -
“The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.”
If Robert Rosenthal and his associates are correct and negative expectations lead to negative results then, it’s not just advisable that we see ourselves and our fellow humans as capable of positive change, it’s essential. We often believe that what we think about others is not an expression of our expectations of them but simply a statement of fact. But it isn’t as simple as that. As Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson say in the Preface to Pygmalion in the Classroom, that:
“People, more often than not, do what is expected of them.”
Which means that we need to be careful with expectations. We probably need to become aware of the ways in which expectations can influence actions even when we’re not aware of it.
Because if it’s the case that expectations influence how we act ourselves and also how others act then the truth is that we’re creating the world together, which is a thought that’s both scary and exciting!
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(1) Robert Rosenthal/Lenore Jacobson, Pygmalion in The Classroom, Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1968, pp. 3-4