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November 07, 2003
Expectations Effect By Tom Smith A very interesting (and scary for parents) column in the WSJ's science journal (B-1) today. Both children and lab rats respond very sensitively to expectations of performance. Here's a sample, which I hope is protected by fair use: British philosopher Bertrand Russell was only half joking when he described the powerful effect that the nationality of a scientist can have on lab rats. "Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible display of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance," he wrote in 1927. "Animals observed by Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve the solution out of their inner consciousness." Expectation effects, also known as the Pygmalion effect, have been documented time and again (479 studies have found that teachers' expectations affect how students do, for instance). But nailing down exactly how expectations are conveyed to students, athletes or research volunteers through the nonverbal, subtle and usually unintentional messages that Prof. Rosenthal calls "covert communication" has been much tougher. More alarming is how little-known the expectation effect is. And that means there is a good possibility that some of the effects we attribute to a particular cause -- from the benefits of smaller class sizes to the health-improving effects of wealth -- actually reflect the power of expectations. The power of expectations in the classroom is downright scary. In a typical experiment, elementary-school teachers were told that one group of kids had done extraordinarily well on a test that predicts intellectual "blooming," and so would make remarkable academic gains. The test seemed prescient: After a few months, the "bloomers" it identified had achieved statistically significant gains over the other students. |