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Why can a simple lie significantly increase students' IQ? The amazing secret behind the Pygmalion effect!
In the world of education, many theories attempt to explain how students excel as a result. One striking phenomenon is the Pygmalion Effect, which reveals how expectations affect performance. According to this effect, high expectations can promote students' academic excellence, while the opposite may lead to poor performance. This has led many people to wonder: To what extent can teachers’ expectations affect students’ potential?
The Pygmalion effect is named after Greek mythology, which tells the story of a sculptor, Pygmalion, who was deeply in love with his sculptures, and eventually the sculptures came to life.
This effect was most famously studied by psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson. In their book Pygmalion in the Classroom, they argue that teachers' expectations of students can significantly affect their academic performance. This result has triggered a rethinking of the role of teachers in the education community.
Their research shows that when teachers believe that certain students will excel, these students actually improve their performance as a result. This is due to a psychological phenomenon known as the observer expectancy effect, whereby the expectations of others tend to translate into reality. The consequences are hard to ignore, especially among the youngest students, whose fragile minds are more easily influenced by expectations.
According to the Pygmalion Effect, when a teacher believes that the students in front of them are capable of success, they may unintentionally provide more support and encouragement during teaching.
However, this research is not without controversy. Many scholars are skeptical of the study's methodology and its results, noting that teachers' expectations may not be the only factor affecting student performance. Educational psychologist Robert L. Thorndike pointed out that the study's IQ testing tool had major flaws that called into question the credibility of the results.
Even so, the Pygmalion effect is still fertile ground for educational applications. Not only does it impact student academic achievement, it is also used in many other areas, including the workplace and military training. In research by the Israel Defense Forces, instructors' expectations for certain trainees can directly affect the performance of these trainees, which once again confirms the role of expectations in shaping behavior.
This phenomenon also has compelling applications in nursing. One study showed that when caregivers were told that some patients would recover faster than others, those patients actually made faster progress in recovery and showed lower levels of depression. Such evidence has further attracted attention to the potential of the Pygmalion effect in the medical field.
However, the operation of the Pygmalion effect between genders remains controversial. Studies have found that this effect is often not significant for women, which provides a warning for teachers’ gender discrimination when setting expectations and reminds us to hold fair and equal expectations for all students.
In addition to the expected positive effects, research also points to potential ethical issues with the Pygmalion effect, as this effect often relies on some degree of deception, which in real organizational settings may lead to a crisis of trust.
As educational research continues to deepen, is the Pygmalion effect still an unsolved mystery? Is the relationship between teachers, students and expectations really as critical as research reveals? This question leads us to rethink every aspect of education and even deepens our fundamental understanding of how expectations influence human behavior.
In this context, have you begun to reflect on whether you have also unintentionally become the person affected by other people's expectations in your life?
