The Pygmalion Effect
How making someone feel better, actually makes them better.
Research shows that our opinions and attitudes towards ourselves are a great deal affected by the opinions and attitudes of others. To a certain degree the way others see us can actually become a new reality whether there’s truth to the way they see us to begin with or not.
In other words, the expectations and beliefs of others about us can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In psychology, this phenomenon is called the Pygmalion Effect after the mythical roman sculptor who carved a statue of his ideal woman and brought her to life.
In a classic 1968 experiment by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, elementary school teachers were told that some of their students were shown by newly developed tests to go through an extraordinary intellectual growth phase in the coming months. In reality, these little wonders of the classroom were picked randomly. It is also crucial to note here that the kids did not know they were being marked as special. After eight months real IQ and other tests showed that these randomly picked kids had gained significantly more points in IQ and scored much better grades than their classmates. Researchers concluded that the mere beliefs and expectations of the teachers made the teachers create a better environment for these special…
