How much do our expectations of others – positive or negative – influence our relationships with them? Most of us believe that our judgements of other people are based on our experience of them but is it really as straightforward as that?
In their book, Pygmalion in the Classroom – Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jackson challenge this idea.
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)
In the early 1960s, James Sweeney taught industrial management and psychiatry at Tulane University and was also responsible for the operation of the Biomedical Computer Centre. James Sweeney believed that he could teach anybody to become a computer operator. This was a big claim back in the 1960s when operating computers was specialized and technical.(2)
But Sweeney was sure he could teach even an uneducated person to do this job. So he chose to train the computer centre janitor – George Johnson, a former hospital porter. Each morning, Mr. Johnson performed his janitorial duties, while in the afternoons he studied computers. In spite of the fact that he was making a lot of progress, management discovered what was happening and insisted Johnson 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 stop his training. James Sweeney threatened to resign and the administration in the College relented. Embarrassingly for the college administration, George Johnson not only learned to operate a computer, he went on to run the main computer room and eventually was put in charge of training new operators.
The clear lesson from this experience is that George Johnson’s capabilities were more closely related to James Sweeney’s expectations than to any, so-called, objective criteria. Because it seems, as Rosenthal and Jackson say in the Preface to Pygmalion in the Classroom, that:
People, more often than not, do what is expected of them. (3)
The reasons that people do what is expected of them are complex but not all that mysterious. Expectations alter our behaviour in subtle ways and this can bring about the change even in another person. However, while subtle – these tiny Butterfly Effect 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.
(1) Robert Rosenthal/Lenore Jacobson, Pygmalion in The Classroom, Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1968, p.4
(2) ibid, Chapter 1
(3) ibid, p.4
Tomorrow – Human Nature – A Conceptual Framework – III
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