American researcher Robert Rosenthal decided to conduct a study on " self-fulfilling prophecies ." He and his team conducted a social psychology experiment in an elementary school. First, he administered an intelligence test to the students. He then randomly selected a small number of students, regardless of the test results, and informed the teachers that these were highly intelligent children and that they could expect rapid growth in their intellectual abilities. After a year, Rosenthal and his team returned to the school and found that the students who had been identified as highly intelligent had confirmed the predictions ; indeed, they had surpassed them, having significantly improved their performance, significantly and decisively superior to that of their classmates. This demonstrated how the information acquired had influenced the teachers' behavior toward children who were deemed superior based on presumed data, but who in reality had "only" responded positively to the large number of stimuli presented to them.
The Pygmalion Effect: Myth and Comedy
The Pygmalion effect , also known as the Rosenthal effect, can manifest itself not only in the school environment but also in other contexts, such as the workplace in the relationships between bosses and employees, or the family in the relationships between parents and children, and in all those contexts where social relationships develop. Expectations can therefore influence the quality of interpersonal relationships and the performance of individuals. The impact of this psychosocial mechanism is already evident in ancient Greek myth and comedy. In Greek mythology, Ovid tells the story of Pygmalion , a sculptor, who, after creating and shaping an ivory statue representing his ideal of femininity and beauty, falls in love with it. Venus—the goddess of beauty—is moved and grants Pygmalion's wish and prayers, bringing the statue to life.
In George Bernard Shaw 's comedy, the Pygmalion is a phonetics professor (Higgins) who bets his friend (Colonel Pickering) that he can transform a pretty but vulgar flower girl (Eliza) into a refined lady. Alongside the concept of molding, Shaw introduces another that he considers closely related: the concept of expectation , considering what people expect to see. Eliza is indeed mistaken for a great lady. The effect lies not in how she behaves, but in how she is treated.
The Pygmalion Effect and Business
These theoretical and experimental implications are far from foreign to our daily lives, as Marco Montemagno demonstrates in the video below, proposing their application to the world of business. If accountant Fantozzi had received positive feedback from his boss about his IQ, the importance of his work to the company, and the depth of his abilities, poor Ugo would likely not have become the emblem of the frustrated and incompetent employee, but a successful, self-confident man. The line between overestimating someone with little potential and underestimating someone with great potential is extremely fine. Certainly, especially in unbalanced relationships, what others expect of us, how they make us feel, whether positive or negative, will have a strong impact on what we are capable of doing. In other words, it is not true that every Ugo Fantozzi hides a Steve Jobs but that each of us, as social animals , is the reflection of an entire code of roles, stimuli, responses and it is on the basis of these, as well as personal inclinations, that we shape our own identity card.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avSzfUJkGyM
Roberta Cricelli
A silent observer with a voluble pen. She believes that to tell the world with a distinctly poetic vein, one must understand its inner workings. She loves her homeland, Calabria, a land of contradictory beauty.
