Pygmalion-Love your work?

Research for my new book (Daughters Seven Things I Have to Tell You) has lead me into some interesting areas some unexpected. Today I was fascinated to stumble across the Pygmalion effect.

 Rosenthal and Jacobsen           The work of Rosenthal and Jacobsen (1968), among others, shows that teacher expectations influence student performance. Positive expectations influence performance positively, and negative expectations influence performance negatively. Rosenthal and Jacobson originally described the phenomenon as the Pygmalion Effect.

  “When we expect certain behaviours of others, we are likely to act in ways that make the expected behaviour more likely to occur.” (Rosenthal and Babad, 1985)

Pygmalion in Tradition        Pygmalion in Ovid’s Metamorphoses  was a sculptor who fell in love with an ivory statue of his own making. Enamoured by the beauty of his own making, Pygmalion begs the gods to give him a wife in the likeness of the statue. The gods grant the request, and the statue comes to life. George Bernard Shaw adopted Pygmalion for the title of his play about Professor Henry Higgins whose sense of self-efficacy is grandiose: “You see this creature with her curbstone

In terms of teaching, faculty's who gripe about students establish a climate of failure, but faculty's who value their students’abilities create a climate of success. What kind of learning climate are you creating through your expectations?English . . . in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party.”

Pygmalion at work       The Pygmalion effect can infiltrate departments. “Departments and institutions develop their own cultures; the prevailing attitudes of managers toward employees tend to become organisational norms. If most managers in the department have a low sense of efficacy and tacitly agree that certain groups of workers (sometimes even all workers) can’t learn, are slow, inefficient, not loyal,  then they will, be.  Newcomers are pressured to accept the same low sense of efficacy and accompanying low expectations.

Pygmalion and relationships      The Pygmalion effect  influences our whole realm of relationships from career to personal and is not confined to the verbal but also involves non-verbal communication. (only seven percent of communication is verbal) if you set low standards for your partner then you expectations are more then likely going to be met.

Pygmalion and writing       Authors spend inordinate time creating a manuscript,  researching, rewriting, editing, agonising, in fact it becomes your other life. The (Pygmalion trap) trap is that you can fall in love with it to the degree that you are blindsided to its faults and weaknesses. You want it to come alive at the expense of  true evaluation. 

Things to do:

Never forecast failure.
Do not participate in gripe sessions.

Establish high expectations.

Be Positive.

Writers:   Your book is your creation but it takes a team with skills that you may not possess to make it the final product it deserves to be.