Pygmalion

In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion was a sculptor who created a sculpture of a woman that was so perfect that he fell in love with it.  He prayed to the goddess Aphrodite, who in answering his prayers, brought the sculpture, Galatea, to life.  The story has inspired countless works of art and literature based on a similar theme, including (most notably - see more below), George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion and the 1956 musical, My Fair Lady, William Shakespeare's play, The Winter's Tale, Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "The Birth-Mark" and novella, Rappacicini's Daughter, Henry James' novel Portrait of a Lady, Edith Wharton's novel The House of Mirth, and the popular movies, Weird Science, Mannequin, Pretty Woman, and She's All That.

The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion in 1913 about an English gentleman and phonetics professor named Henry Higgins, who after meeting Eliza Doolittle, a poor flower seller with a strong Cockney accent in the streets of London, boasts that he can transform her into a “duchess” simply by teaching her to speak proper English.  Over the course of the next several months, Higgins trains Eliza rigorously.  While she struggles initially, she eventually masters both the arts of fine speech and etiquette to pass for a gentle lady at a high-society party.  Higgins, however, begins to treat Eliza as an object of study, rather than as a person, prompting her to eventually leave him.  

Shaw's play was turned into a Tony Award winning musical, My Fair Lady, starring Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins and Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle.  The musical was adapted for the big screen in 1964, again starring Harrison as Professor Higgins, but replacing Andrews with the better known (at least in film) actress Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle.  The film was a smash hit, becoming the second-highest-grossing film of 1964 (after Mary Poppins) and winning eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor.  Notably, Julie Andrews won the Academy Award for Best Actress that year for the movie Mary Poppins!

In many ways, the overarching theme to all of these works of art and literature comes down to how you treat individuals.  Eliza Doolittle explained it best, "You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves but how she's treated.  I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins because he always treats me as a flower girl and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you because you always treat me as a lady and always will."

As it turns out, creating positive expectations - and, for that matter, negative ones - can actually turn into positive attitudes, positive behaviors, and positive performance.  Even if this concept was first described in ancient Greece, it wasn't scientifically "proven" until the early 1960's, when a group of psychology students at the University of North Dakota, of all places, were asked by the renowned social psychologist Robert Rosenthal to assist with an experiment involving laboratory rats.  Six of the students were told that their assigned rats ("maze-bright" rats) were bred to be smart enough to rapidly move through a maze, while the other six students were told that their rats ("maze-dull" rats) were genetically inferior and would likely have a lot of trouble moving through the maze.  Here's the catch - the rats were all genetically similar!  None of the rats had been trained to run through the maze, and they had in fact been assigned randomly to the two groups.  However, the so-called "maze-bright" rats performed significantly better than the "maze-dull" rats from the very beginning and until the end of the experiment!  The "maze-dull" rats wouldn't even budge from the starting position in the maze.

Rosenthal published his findings in 1963 in the journal Behavioral Science (see "The effect of experimenter bias on the performance of the albino rat").  In a subsequent article published in Scientific American, Rosenthal and co-author Lenore Jacobson discussed the findings of the original rat study which sheds further light on what they called the "Pygmalion Effect".  Rosenthal and Jacobson reported, "The students with the allegedly brighter rats ranked their subjects as brighter, more pleasant, and more likeable than did the students who had allegedly 'duller' rats...Asked about their methods of dealing with the rats, the students with the 'bright' group turned out friendlier and more enthusiastic with the animals than the students with the 'dull' group had been.  The students with the 'bright' rats also said they handled their animals as well as more gently, than the students expecting poor performance did."

All of this would be purely academic if not for Rosenthal's subsequent experiments with teachers working with students in the classroom.  Lenore Jacobson was, in fact, the principal at Spruce Elementary School in San Francisco.  She had read Rosenthal's rat study and wrote back to Rosenthal, volunteering her students to participate in further studies ("If you ever 'graduate' to classroom children, please let me know if I can be of assistance").  Teachers at Spruce Elementary were told that Rosenthal and his team would be administering "The Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition" in the spring.  However, in truth, the "test" was nothing more than a standard IQ test.  After the testing was completed, teachers were informed that there were groups of students in each class who were academically gifted and who would "blossom" during the academic year.  Again, similar to the earlier rat maze experiments above, students were randomly assigned to groups.  One year later, students were re-tested using the same "Harvard Test".  Notably, the "blossoming" students score significantly better on the second test, while the other students scores didn't change.  

Once again, teachers had treated the "blossoming" students differently, without even realizing that they were doing so.  They were more encouraging with these students, provided them with additional help, and gave them positive feedback using warmer body language.  They almost never criticized these students.  Rosenthal and Jacobson published their findings in 1968 book, entitled Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils' Intellectual Development.

The German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said, "Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them become what they are capable of being."  What's true for rats and elementary school students is also true for people in general.  What's true for teachers, as it turns out, is also true for leaders.  When leaders treat their teams with positive expectations, their teams actually perform better (see the Harvard Business Review article, "Pygmalion in Management" by J. Sterling Livingston).  Treat people in the opposite manner, and they will respond in kind (which is known as the "Golem effect").