Pygmalion Effect vs Golem Effect

When we expect certain behaviours of others, we are likely to act in ways that make the expected behaviour more likely to occur.

—Robert Rosenthal

George Bernard Shaw, in his famous play, Pygmalion, dilates upon the transformative effect of one's expectations and treatment upon others. In the play, Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, asserts his confidence in his skill to teach phonetics that he can even train a poor cockney flower girl, Eliza Dolittle, to pass for a duchess. But his emphasis is on teaching the accent without treating her with respect. Eliza exclaims: "The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated."

However, Colonel Pickering, also a professor of phonetics, treats Eliza considerately throughout the play, that's why she thanks him: "I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will."

The expectations teachers have of their students inevitably affect the way that teachers interact with them, which ultimately leads to changes in the students' behaviour and attitude. The work of Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson shows that teachers' expectations influence students' performance positively, and they describe this phenomenon as the Pygmalion Effect. They discovered it in a groundbreaking study in the 1960s in their book, Pygmalion in the Classroom.

In an experiment, Rosenthal apprises teachers that they are being given a group of students who have aced a very special test from Harvard, and the test has predicted that the students are intellectual bloomers. But actually, the students were randomly picked from various classes, having nothing to distinguish them from others.

After following up for two years the students and their progress, he finds that the teachers' expectations of these students to perform excellently have affected the students positively. He writes: "If teachers had been led to expect greater gains in IQ, then increasingly, those kids gained more IQ."

Rosenthal wanted to unearth the link between expectations and IQ. He conducted more research and discovered that expectations condition teachers' every interaction with the students in innumerable invisible ways. The teachers gave everything to the students, the prerequisites for success: more time to answer questions, more specific feedback, and more approval. They patted students encouragingly and passed smiles generously. "The expectations of one person can positively affect another person's performance, particularly if that is communicated through social cues such as body language and tone of voice," he avers.

Actually, we are the incarnation of the Golem Effect, the opposite of the Pygmalion Effect. As per Golem Effect, our low expectations of others bring about corresponding low response from others. The educators particularly at public educational institutions have in their subconscious the poor view of the students hailing from humble background, they label them hopeless cases, under-achievers or trouble-makers, not made to excel and etch their mark at higher levels. "The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become," says Goethe.

Even though American developmental psychologist Howard Gardner first proposed the idea of multiple intelligences in 1983, we are still adamant on treating intelligence as a Boolean variable: one is intelligent or not. His theory postulates eight distinct types of intelligence, each of which can exist without the others.

The teachers who respect diversity in students' abilities are becoming extinct. One-size-fits-all pedagogy ignores this diversity. Teachers' expectations prove self-fulfilling prophecies. Rosenthal and Jacobson discover: "The results of the study suggest that reality can be altered by the mere expectation of a certain behaviour."