Pygmalion and Intelligence?

Abstract

Rosenthal has again presented his I Pygmalion in the Classroom study as the best example of interpersonal ex pectancy effects, cloaking it for sup port in meta-analyses of related though not comparable research.1 In my view, both his data and his field of work are thus misrepresented to both psychological science and the public. The dispute about Pygmal ion has a long history with many fac ets.2 Without trying to rehash it all in a small space, I focus here on the core malady and a suggested cure. To be clear, I agree that the gen eral evidence shows that interper sonal expectancies exist as psycho logical phenomena, and that teacher expectancies, as an example, can influence classroom teaching and learning, at least sometimes.3 But I do not agree that the evidence shows an influence of teacher ex pectancy on learner intelligence.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 46 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.