Robert Rosenthal

I think that's one of the most important discoveries in psychological science in the last 50 years.

There was this very famous study called the Pygmalion Effect, and it was run by a Harvard professor named Bob Rosenthal.

And he randomly assigned children in elementary school to two conditions.

Some children were just gonna go through elementary school the way they go through elementary school.

And then long story short, kiss the statue, it turned into a living woman and he married it.

So Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson brought it together and called it the Pygmalion Effect, right? Because that was his expectations that it would come alive and become his future wife.

So basically Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson did a little study that made this famous and They took a handful of teachers, and I don't think they're allowed to do this anymore.

So they took a group of teachers of equal talent, equal skill, took groups of kids of equal IQ, and then they divided them up.

Basically, everything was equal, except this.

El estudio se hizo con unos niños de primaria en una escuela de California.

Antes de que comenzara el año escolar, el psicólogo de Harvard, Bob Rosenthal, quien planteaba que la confianza se toma prestada y viene de los demás, quiso comprobar qué ocurre cuando alguien cree en ti, confía en tus capacidades y ve un potencial en ti que tú todavía no eres capaz de reconocer.

Le dice que puede hacerlo y actúa como si realmente pudiera lograrlo.

Entonces, divide al azar a los niños en dos grupos.

Does it make a difference whether your teacher believes that you are a high performer or a low performer, that you are a late bloomer, that even though you haven't demonstrated your intellectual ability, you will blossom? or you're not a good student or you're a good student.

Psychologist Robert Rosenthal and school principal Lenore Jacobson did a remarkable study some years ago in which they told school teachers, elementary school teachers, that on the basis of some psychological test, some of their students, some of the children in their class were designated as late bloomers.

Even though they hadn't shown any academic success, they are expected to bloom.

The amazing thing is that in a very short time, the teachers began to treat those children differently than the other kids.

Those kids began to think of themselves differently, and in the end, they actually performed significantly better than the other kids.

They were transformed by the teacher's positive expectations, the opposite of Jane Elliott's study in which teachers' negative expectations that the teacher infused led them to think of themselves as inferior.

So let's see the Pygmalion effect in action in these classrooms set up by Rosenthal and Jacobson.

Positive expectations can change a person's perception of a situation just as dramatically as negative expectations.

It will bring them to life.

So the study is that there are these little kids at an elementary school in California, and they're just going through elementary school, and before the beginning of the school year, this Harvard psychologist, um, named Bob Rosenthal, who came to this hypothesis that belief is borrowed, that self-confidence comes from other people, that you need to be in these relationships because who has the belief that they can do something until someone else says they can do it and acts like they can do it? So he randomly assigns these kids to either be labeled as gifted or not, right? And for the gifted group, he goes and he tells their teachers, he's like, "Oh, by the way, here's the list of kids.

Before the school year starts, uh, I gave them the, like, Harvard test of inflected reasoning." I mean, he made this up.

Right.

We observe a small amount of information and then construct a much larger story.

Psychologist Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal conducted a major meta-analysis in nineteen ninety-two examining what they called thin slices of expressive behavior.

They analyzed thirty-eight different results involving predictions from brief observations of behavior.

Across those studies, the overall effect size for prediction accuracy was reported as R equals point three nine.

So rules are there then to punish people for that.

Whereas the distinction of having high expectations, non-negotiable expectations goes back to, you know, like when we've had this conversation in the past around the work of a guy called Robert Rosenthal that did a famous study called the Pygmalion effect, where he went into a classroom and picked kids out at random and said, "These kids are gonna be high performers." And over the course of the year, those kids outperformed the rest of the class.

And then he revealed that actually he'd just picked them at random.

But it was our expectations of those children that meant they lived up to them.

So he had this belief that expectations about your own future could be self-fulfilling prophecies.

But what made Bob's work singularly influential was that he also observed that our expectations of ourselves are socially determined.

When someone says to you, you know what, I've taught a lot of kids and I'm taking you aside to tell you, I know you can learn algebra.

I just wanted to share that with you because you may not know that yourself.

So it was all made up.

But what happened was, especially with the younger students, which is interesting, but overall, you know, what they found was that those prophecies came true.

And Bob Rosenthal spent the rest of his career studying the Pygmalion effect.

And what he later unearthed was that when someone thinks that you can do well, you internalize that.