Many of our daily judgments, although they seem thoughtful, are not rational and can lead us to unwise decisions. These errors in judgment are known as “cognitive biases,” and there are currently about 250 identified. While the field of education promotes critical thinking, the relationship between teachers and learners often fosters the emergence of certain biases, which can have significant consequences on learning. The Pygmalion effect is one such example, and the first step in preventing it is to know it exists and better understand it.

The Influence of One Person’s Expectations on Another’s Performance

The Pygmalion effect sometimes called the Rosenthal and Jacobson effect, comes from the Greek myth of King Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell in love with his statue, Galatea, which he brought to life. This phenomenon occurs when the mere belief in an individual’s ability to succeed influences their performance, particularly when the believer holds a position of influence or authority. The inverse of the Pygmalion effect is sometimes called the Golem effect, which happens when a person in authority believes an individual’s abilities to succeed are limited, causing that person to perform worse. Both the Pygmalion and Golem effects correspond to what is known in social psychology as a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” a phenomenon where an erroneous belief leads to its own realization.

In 1968, psychologist Robert Rosenthal and school principal Lenore Jacobson published a landmark work, Pygmalion in the Classroom. In this, they described their experiment conducted in an American school, where they made teachers believe, using fake IQ tests, that certain students were gifted. To some extent, this new perception by the teachers led these students to significantly improve their results, both on IQ tests and in other subjects.

Before studying the Pygmalion effect in a school, Rosenthal discovered the phenomenon during an experiment with two groups of his students, who were asked to analyze the performance of lab rats navigating a maze. The professor made the first group believe that the rats they were assigned had been strictly selected, with supposedly above-average intelligence. In reality, the rats were chosen at random, just like those assigned to the second group, whom Rosenthal described as likely genetically disadvantaged for the task. The first group of students showed affection toward their rats, believing them to be advantaged, while the second group did not display fondness toward their supposedly disadvantaged rats. As Rosenthal anticipated, during the test, the second group’s rats performed worse than the first group’s, with some not even leaving the starting line.

In-Depth Study of the Phenomenon

Since the publication of Pygmalion in the Classroom, many studies have explored this effect to assess its scope, limits, and factors that can intensify or diminish it. The existence of the phenomenon has been well established, as David Trouilloud and Philippe Sarrazin note in their summary of studies dedicated to the three decades following Rosenthal and Jacobson: “In all these studies, a self-fulfilling prophecy (SFP) was demonstrated when a teacher’s belief or expectation about a student altered the teacher’s attitude toward that student, who ultimately tended to conform to the teacher’s belief.”

In 2006, Trouilloud and Sarrazin followed about 20 teachers and 400 students over a year and identified the stages of the Pygmalion effect’s development:

1. Anticipation: a phase during which the teacher is influenced by information received about their students, which leads them to “form differentiated expectations for each student.”
2. Behavior: the phase where the teacher’s expectations result in “specific treatment of the students, manifesting in particular academic tasks, feedback, and emotional support,” which leads students to internalize this perception.
3. Results: the differentiated treatment alters the students’ results.

Managing This Cognitive Bias

It is complex to prevent the Pygmalion effect from occurring in all teacher-learner relationships, partly because developing differentiated expectations toward students is not necessarily a bad thing; it can even signify a quality teaching approach. As Trouilloud and Sarrazin explain: “The practical implications of research on the Pygmalion effect are not insignificant (for literature reviews, see Good and Brophy, 2000; Weinstein and McKown, 1998). First, it is essential to remember that it is natural for any teacher to have differentiated expectations, as every student is unique. When these expectations are accurate and regularly updated, they help in planning the students’ learning. However, when they are based on poor indicators (such as incorrect prejudices and stereotypes) and/or are too rigid, they can generate inequalities among students.”

Since these “poor indicators” are part of the mechanism that drives the Pygmalion effect and other cognitive biases, teachers must be aware of this phenomenon and avoid letting it influence their expectations to promote equal opportunities for success. According to Olivier Houdé, a developmental psychologist and neuroscientist, one can best achieve this by developing “cognitive resistance,” that is, “learning to think against oneself.” Trouilloud and Sarrazin also recommend that teachers set high expectations for their students. They cite a study showing that the positive effect of high expectations seems to outweigh the negative impact of low expectations. According to their synthesis, high expectations help optimize students’ success because teachers are more likely to:

• Create a warmer emotional climate.
• Provide more feedback on student performance.
• Offer more content and more challenging content to learn.
• Give students more opportunities to ask and answer questions.

However, while teachers can become more attentive to the expectations they have of their students and maintain as many positive expectations as possible, Trouilloud and Sarrazin remind us that it would be “naïve to believe that we can train teachers to develop only positive expectations,” as these behaviours are partly unconscious. Additionally, these processes are highly complex, involving subjective factors such as emotions, personality, and personal experiences. Moreover, we now know more about how cognitive biases emerge: we have little control over these automatic thoughts generated by one of our three cognitive systems, and we are often inclined to believe these thoughts are rational when they are not.

The Struggle Against Cognitive Biases

Being an adult does not necessarily offer an advantage in this fight against cognitive biases. The psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics who coined the concept of cognitive bias, Daniel Kahneman, attempted to raise awareness among groups of civil servants, military personnel, and students about the existence of cognitive biases. While these interventions with the latter group of young people proved encouraging, his attempts to sensitize the other groups were less successful, as these adults found it much more challenging to recognize their own illusions.

Olivier Houdé also observes that adults do not have the same flexibility as young people in training the inhibitory system—the cognitive system that allows us to resist cognitive biases. “My team is regularly asked to intervene in large French industrial groups, for example, with graduates from the École Polytechnique, but it’s costly and complicated because the adult brain is mature. Automatic behaviors have long been established. It becomes difficult to resist them. On the other hand, we could easily incorporate this into school programs,” he explains. However, Houdé does not encourage adults to give up against the illusions of their brains to which they are more accustomed. On the contrary, they should redouble their efforts, especially when they have the power to improve the success of tomorrow’s adults.