Pygmalion in the Classroom

Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson

Self-fulfilling prophecies are powerful particularly within social institutions. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson demonstrated the power of self-fulfilling prophecies in a school setting.1

The two researchers had spent much of their careers in education and had become increasingly concerned that teachers' expectations of lower-class and minority children were contributing to the high rates of failure among these students.

Such ideas were not without support. In the early 1950s sociologist Howard Becker had found that teachers in slum schools used different teaching techniques and expected less from their students than did teachers in middle-class schools.2

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