Pygmalion effect

The Pygmalion effect (or Rosenthal effect) refers to situations in which students perform better than other students simply because they are expected to do so.

Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1968/1992) report and discuss the Pygmalion effect at length. In their study, they showed that if teachers were led to expect enhanced performance from some children, then the children did indeed show that enhancement. In some cases such improvement was about twice that showed by other children in the same class.

Introduction

The purpose of the study was to support the hypothesis that reality can be influenced by the expectations of others. This influence can be beneficial as well as detrimental depending on which label an individual is assigned. The observer-expectancy effect which involves an experimenter's unconscious biased expectations is being tested in real life situations. Rosenthal tested the hypothesis that biased expectancies can essentially affect reality and create self-fulfilling prophecies as a result. In this experiment, Rosenthal predicts that, when given the information that certain students are brighter than others, elementary school teachers may unconsciously behave in ways that facilitate and encourage the students' success. The prior research that motivated this study was the research done in 1911 by psychologists regarding the case of "Clever Hans". Clever Hans was a horse that gained notoriety because it was supposed to be able to read, spell, and solve math problems by using its hoof to answer. Many skeptics suggested that questioners and observers were unintentionally signaling Clever Hans. For instance whenever Clever Hans was asked a question the observers demeanor usually elicited a certain behavior from the subject that in turn confirmed their expectations.

Method

In Rosenthal's study the participants included all the students in the first through six grades. Each student was given an IQ test called the Test of General Ability (TOGA), but the teachers were told that the students were taking the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition which would identify which students would bloom more rapidly academically. The experimenters chose the TOGA because it was a nonverbal test in which the score was not dependent upon the students' mastery of such school-learned skills as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Another advantage of using this test was that it was more likely that the teachers would not be familiar with it. After the children were tested, teachers were given results of those who scored in the top twenty percentile, but the names of the students who scored highly were not based on tests. Instead the names were randomly chosen. Near the end of the year, the same IQ test was given once again to the students. This was done to measure significant changes in those students the teachers were told were brighter as compared to those students that were not.

Results

For the most part, the students who were identified as the top twenty percentile had shown an increase in IQ greater than those who were not identified as "bloomers". For the entire school, the students thought to be "gifted" averaged a 12.2 increase in I.Q. while the rest only averaged an 8.2 increase. This phenomenon was more pronounced in the first and second grades and nearly nonexistent in the fifth and sixth grade. Other grade levels did not show a distinctive relation between teachers' expectations and students' performance. Rosenthal also looked at the percentage of first- and second-grade students with major gains in I.Q. perhaps to emphasize the much higher increases in levels of I.Q. among those students thought to be gifted.

Discussion

Rosenthal suggested that this happened because perhaps children are thought to be more malleable or because students did not have established reputations yet. Rosenthal also suggested that students in the lower grades might be more susceptible to subtle changes the teacher makes to encourage successful performance. Although Rosenthal did not elaborate, he mentioned that lower-grade teachers may communicate their expectations of students better or more clearly than the upper-grade teachers. Overall the importance of Rosenthal's and Jacobson's study was that an individual's expectation does in fact affect the outcome of the subjects' performance. Rosenthal and Jacobson were able to support the hypothesis. The only limitations or problems were the fact that older students did not show such an increase in IQ scores.

Subsequent research done by Chaiken, Singler, and Derlega involved using videotape to capture teachers' interaction with students that had been identified as bright students. These interactions revealed that teachers smile and make more eye contact with bright students while other students are treated in a generalized standard manner. As a result those students whose teachers have higher expectations of generally do better which proves the correlation between expectations and performance. The biggest study was at the "Oak School", an otherwise unidentified United States primary school. Teachers were deceived into believing that a set of one fifth of their class were expected to develop much faster than the rest, as measured by IQ points. In fact, this set was randomly selected, or rather selected by stratified random sampling, giving a better guarantee that the participants were extremely similar in both mean and variation to the rest of the class.The main measure was a kind of IQ test, administered at the start of the school year (pretest) and at four months (end of first semester), eight months (end of second semester and of first year of school), and 20 months (end of second school year with a different teacher). Maximum overall effect was found at eight months, but a lot of gain was still present at 20 months. There was a big effect on first and second grade children by the end of the first year. By the end of the second year, much of the improvement differential had disappeared from those classes, but in other classes positive effects had emerged for the first time.Girls and boys gained in somewhat different ways (verbal vs. reasoning subscales). The advantage was true of pre/post testing using an IQ test. It was also true of teacher assessments, e.g. reading grades, which showed a big effect with the third grade group as well. They also did blind re-testing of a sample by an examiner who was not the teacher and who didn't know which were supposed to do well; here they got results showing a greater difference.Another effect was that pupils in the control group who improved against expectation were disliked by teachers, or at least showed signs of conflict with them.This is the biggest and most careful study. Besides primary school pupils, it has also been shown for algebra at the United States Air Force Academy and for university students as well.

Comments on the effect

One educational reformer concluded:

"Labeling matters, and the younger the person getting the label is, the more it matters." [1]

James Rhem, executive editor for the online National Teaching and Learning Forum (www.ntlf.com), commented:
*"When teachers expect students to do well and show intellectual growth, they do; when teachers do not have such expectations, performance and growth are not so encouraged and may in fact be discouraged in a variety of ways."
*"How we believe the world is and what we honestly think it can become have powerful effects on how things turn out."
*"Rosenthal acknowledges how frustrating it is to know how powerfully teacher expectation affects student performance and not to know how to immediately use that information to improve teaching across the board." [2]

There is more on this study at Hawthorne effect.

Etymology

Rosenthal took the name for his concept from the George Bernard Shaw play, Pygmalion, later popularized by the musical My Fair Lady. The character Henry Higgins believes the cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle can be made into a lady by training her in phonetics and etiquette. In turn, the play was named after the ancient myth of Pygmalion and his statue, which the gods brought to life for him.

Pygmalion effect: Encyclopedia BETA

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