ODYSSEY 201474

to explore experimental ways to test a revolutionary concept: that people’s expectations could influence other people in the world around them. Rosenthal and Jacobson suggested, for example, that if people in society believe that people in Group X are lazy, those expectations result in people in Group X doing very little work. Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) conducted what became a well-known experiment to measure the power of expectations in school environments. As the school year began, teachers were given phony results for their incoming students ’ aptitude tests. The researchers randomly assigned some students to the status of high achievers and others to the status of merely average. Teachers taught for a year with this baseline of false assumptions. When their students were retested, 80 percent of those who had been labeled “high achieving ” showed a statistically greater amount of achievement than their peers. The researchers concluded that teachers ’ expectations had become self-fulfilling prophecies and had led them to behave in ways that made their expectations a reality. Rosenthal and Jacobson called this the “Pygmalion effect, ” in a nod to the play in whic