Author: Martin Mak
Is it possible that your mental performance hinges on how you think people perceive you or how you perceive yourself? Professor Robert Rosenthal of Harvard University discovered many years ago how powerfully your perceptions of people can affect their behavior. The same principle applies to your perception of yourself.
Rosenthal and his colleague Lenore Jacobson, in 1968 reported a study of what they called Pygmalion in the Classroom. The title refers to the George Bernard Shaw play about the way in which a linguist shaped the speech of a Cockney flower girl. Rosenthal and Jacobson discovered that perceptions can affect even children’s measured level of intelligence. They divided the children in this study into two groups. He told teachers that the children in the first group had a high IQ and that the children in the second group had a lower IQ. In reality, however, there was no difference in average IQ between the two groups. (more…)
