Just as I Expected

The experts approached the teachers at the Oak School with an offer that seemed too good to be true.

Our new diagnostic test will identify the hidden gems in each of your classrooms, they said. We'll find those students, they vowed, who haven't stood out intellectually to date, but sit perched on the precipice of a mental growth spurt. We'll tell you exactly which kids are poised to make academic breakthroughs this year.

The name of the test they planned to administer was no less impressive than the results it promised: "The Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition." And it seemed to work wonders.

By the end of the next year, the average 1st grader's IQ at the school had gone up 12 points. But those students identified as "late bloomers" by the test? They had shot up a remarkable 27 points. And, thus, an indispensable diagnostic tool in elementary education was born.

Right?

Only, the experts had made up the whole story. They hadn't used a test to identify intellectual "late bloomers." For that matter, there was no Harvard Test of Inflected Anything. The researchers, Rosenthal and Jacobson, had randomly picked 20% of the kids at the public school and simply told teachers that these were the students on the verge of intellectual growth. That was all it took to make the prophecy come true.

And that's the power of expectation. After seeing their list of academic stars in the making, the teachers suddenly came to believe that these were the children to push just a bit more. These were the kids who needed a second chance to make up for an initial failure, or additional challenges when success came too easily.

Lo and behold, a year later, these students were indeed high achievers.

The Rosenthal and Jacobson study is not without its controversy. Some have questioned the ethics underlying the research, though it's worth noting that 1) the fabricated test results were revealed as such to teachers after the year ended, and 2) the researchers hadn't gone so far as to create negative expectations for any of the students. Other critics have suggested that the actual empirical findings were not nearly as clear-cut as made out to be in print. Indeed, even the researchers themselves reported that significant expectation effects were found in 1st and 2nd grade classrooms, but not in grades 3 and above.

But conclusions regarding the power of expectation are hardly based on just one study. Subsequent research has revealed similar processes at play during ordinary interactions outside of the classroom. Take, for example, research in which a participant is told that she should choose a few questions from a pre-approved list to use in a forthcoming "get-to-know-you" conversation with a stranger. Participants pick very different questions depending on who they think they'll be interacting with.

When expecting to talk to an introverted partner, respondents choose questions like, "What things do you dislike about loud parties?" And "what factors make it really hard for you to open up to people?" Of course, these are questions that-–even when posed to the most gregarious of conversation partners–will make the respondent come off as relatively quiet and introspective.

But when expecting their partner to be an extravert, participants opt for different questions entirely: "What would you do if you wanted to liven things up at a party?" And "In what situations are you most talkative?" In other words, they go with questions that would make even the shiest of wallflowers seem at least a bit outgoing.

And that's exactly what winds up happening in these studies. Not only do participants select questions that are consistent with their expectations, but their unpresuming conversation partners really do come off as more introverted (or extraverted), even to naïve observers. In other words, participants' expectations lead to real, observable changes in the way the conversation partner behaves.

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These types of interpersonal self-fulfilling prophecies can be found all around us, in situations ranging from the mundane to the profound:

• Like the suitor who lets his friends' description of his blind date's personality color the plans he makes for the evening and the way he acts throughout it.

• And the human resources manager who forms a quick resume- or appearance-based impression of the job candidate, then sticks to it for the duration of the interview.

• Or the students whose expectations for their new teacher impacts their interest in the course and willingness to engage with the material during class.

• Or anyone who lets stereotypes about a certain "kind of person" affect how they treat someone else, thereby eliciting the very behaviors they were anticipating in the first place.

I'm sure you can generate examples from your own life as well.

Of course, it's old news that our expectations color how we see the world around us. Just think about politics: two years ago during the presidential election, we heard Republicans harp on the importance of experience, while Democrats touted the need for fresh perspective. But with the surprise emergence of a certain governor from Alaska, it took mere hours for partisans to swap sides of the argument. This same dynamic emerges in the wildly divergent perceptions of rival sports fans, who manage to see a very different game even when sitting side-by-side in the same stadium.

That is, we often see what we want to see.

But what the Oak School study and others like it illustrate is that our preconceived notions do more than alter what we perceive: they also literally change the way that others around us think and act. We have a remarkable ability to make our own expectations come true, and I'm not talking about psychic powers or even self-help through positive thinking. Mull that over the next time you get ready to meet someone for the first time––when you head into an interaction with the assumption that the other person will be, say, rude or indifferent, your own brusque replies to his questions may very well be what's making those expectations come true.