The Pygmalion Effect

Obinna Oguike
Professor Ridenour
HUM 2220
25 February 2016
The Pygmalion Effect:
The Pygmalion effect indicates that teacher expectations influence student performance. This conclusion leads to believe that positive expectations influence performance positively, and consequently, negative expectations influence performance negatively. This phenomenon was discovered in 1968 by Rosenthal and Jacobson, including others. “When we expect certain behaviors of others, we are likely to act in ways that make the expected behavior more likely to occur.” (Rosenthal and Babad, 1985). The understanding is to illustrate that, in terms of teaching, teaching staff who grumble about their students establish an atmosphere of failure, but faculty who seem to value their students’ abilities create an atmosphere of success and progression. This psychological conditioning plays a major role in faculty adherence, their willingness to aid students learn and student’s success moving forward.
The Pygmalion effect was named after Pygmalion a Cypriot sculptor who fell in love with a statue of a woman he had carved. Upon Aphrodite’s festival arrival, Pygmalion made an offering at the altar of Aphrodite, where he, too scared to

This theory translates that people will try harder in performing a task if they have high expectations that their efforts will pay off in terms of increased performance-creating positive links between expectancies, effort and performance (Lawler, 1971; Porter & Lawler, 1968; Vroom, 1964), meaning that when expectations are raised through the Pygmalion effect, higher performance in due course results. The Pygmalion effect ties to social-cognitive theory and its central concept of self-efficacy (i.e., beliefs in one 's abilities to orchestrate the actions needed to reach a particular level of performance; Bandura, 1997; Eden,