It Pays To Say That Your Child’s Ability Is Tops: What You Say Is What You Get!
May 28th, 2009
No comments
How often have you said to yourself, “I don’t give a damn what others say! I know what I know!” Chances are that you would be applauded for your fiercely held self belief. This article is not to make a dent into your self belief. This article is about consequences of others perception, specifically a teacher’s perception of a child’s ability.
In 1948, an article by Robert Merton appeared in The Antioch Review. 
He introduced a concept called “Self fulfilling Prophecy”. This concept has since been bandied around a lot by a whole lot of sociologists and others. Not the least amongst them was those that made it into a rallying point. For example, invoking this concept, an American President tried to verbally buttress an ailing economy. The idea behind this concept is very simple. Let me quote, Jon Clark and Sohan Modgil from their book, Robert K Morten. Self fulfilling prophecy they say is:
The notion that a false but widely believed prediction could become true, simply because
enough people believed in it….
And continuing with their explanation:
The self-fulfilling prophecy begins, according to Merton, with the false definition of a situation,
which in turn engenders behaviour that brings the conformity with the definition.
I know, this is a little dense, but wait, I am getting to the exciting part.
Rosenthal, a researcher at Harvard, hypothetised that ‘self fulfilling prophecy’ should work at the classroom level too. Joined by Jacobson, he conducted his famous ‘Pygmalion in the Classroom’ experiment.
In Oaks School, located in an underprivileged area of San Francisco, they started their experiment. The children were administered a little known IQ test. The test had a fancy name: “Test of Inflected Acquisition”. This was in keeping with the high profile resume of the experimenters. The teachers were told that investigators from Harvard with their ‘Test of Inflected Acquisition’ could identify the potential ‘bloomers’ amongst the students; ‘bloomers’, meaning the students whose IQ was expected to shoot up substantially. The ‘bloomers’ were identified and the list was shared with the teachers. Now, this was a dummy! The list had nothing to do with the test; the children were picked randomly. Difference, if any, in the intellectual prowess of the ‘bloomers’ and the others, existed only in the minds of the teachers.
The teachers’ attitude towards the ‘bloomers’ changed. Their new attitude facilitated and encouraged the ‘bloomers’ success.
A second intelligence test was administered at the end of the year. Those students who had been identified as stars showed, on average, an increase of more than 12 points on their IQ scores, compared to an increase of 8 points among the rest of the students. The differences were even larger in the early grades, with almost half of first- and second-grade bloomers showing an IQ increase of 20 points or more.
The investigators concluded that self fulfilling prophecy was at work. But why was there less intellectual development in the higher grades? Rosenthal and Jacobson have this to say:
…. it is possible that teachers react to children of all grade levels in the same way if they believe them to be capable of intellectual gain. But perhaps it is only the younger children whose performance is affected by the special things the teacher says to them; the special ways in which she says them; the way she looks, postures, and touches the children from whom she expects greater intellectual growth.
Before you lay all the blame at the door of the teacher let us also see what Rosenthal subsequent research in 2002 has revealed. He demonstrated that “the expectations of psychological researchers, classroom teachers, judges in the courtroom, business executives, and health care providers can unintentionally affect the response of their research participants, pupils, jurors, employees and patients.” Clearly, most of us are affected by the self fulfilling prophecy; teachers, parents, almost everyone!
The trick, therefore, seems to be to reinforce our children’s intellectual development through positive self fulfilling prophecy. Tell them they are good and they will become good. What you say is what you get!
But is that possible? Can we learn to become conscious of the signals that we send out unconsciously? And optimise it to our benefit? A study of Clever Hans or Der Kluge Hans seems to suggest otherwise. But that is the topic of another discussion: The Horse that knew how to do Maths!