Idealogian

Expectations

Expectations May Alter Outcomes Far More Than We Realize

"Expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy," says Robert Rosenthal, professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. "When teachers have been led to expect better intellectual performance from their students, they tend to get it. When coaches are led to expect better athletic performance from their athletes, they tend to get it. When behavioral researchers are led to expect a certain response from their research subjects, they tend to get it."

. . .

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.

In reality, there was no such test. To the contrary: The kids the teachers thought were bloomers included students from every ability level as measured by a nonverbal intelligence test. So did the supposed nonbloomers. "The only difference was in the mind, and expectations, of the teacher," says Prof. Rosenthal. Yet those expectations produced clear academic differences.

Teachers said they viewed the bloomers as better adjusted, more affectionate and less in need of social approval. That leads to real differences in how teachers treated their students -- the covert communication. Teachers with high expectations for their students "teach [them] more and teach it more warmly," Prof. Rosenthal writes in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. And they "tend to give greater opportunities for responding and more differentiated feedback" to these students, rather than a pat, "That's great, Ben." The first two factors affect student performance the most.

Expectation effects are not confined to human expect-ees. In one set of studies, 12 experimenters were each given five rats. Six experimenters were told that their rats were of a genetic strain that learned like long-tailed geniuses; the other six were told that their rats were dolts. The experimenters then spent five days training their rats to run a maze.

From the first day, the rats identified as bright ran the maze better -- and kept getting better.

You can guess the punch line: all the rats belonged to the same strain. They differed only in the experimenters' expectations for them. In this case, the covert communication probably came from the way experimenters with "smart" rats acted: They felt more relaxed and enthusiastic as they worked with the rats, talked to them less (fewer outbursts of "you stupid rat!") and handled them more.

Thanks for the link, Dad!

Side note: I've decided that if I post only those items about which I presume to have some clever comment, I may miss out on some good stuff, so from now on, some links may be posted "as-is." Though I reserve the right to think up some clever comment a day later and post it then.

And indeed, five hours after the original posting:

Too bad this doesn't seem to work with computers. No matter how much I expect them to actually work, they always crash. Or perhaps I've just come to expect that.