Page 163 - The Social Animal

Social Cognition 145

Often, in real face-to-face interactions, the process observed in
the Darley and Gross experiment does not stop with mere judg-
ments. In a classic experiment Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacob-
46
son planted a false stereotype in the heads of schoolteachers, which
had a dramatic impact on the performance of their students. In this
study, the experimenters first gave an IQ test to all the children in an
elementary school. After scoring the tests, 20 percent of the children
from each class were chosen at random. The teachers were informed
that the test had indicated that these students were “bloomers,” on
the verge of making significant intellectual gains over the coming
year, thus giving the teachers a false expectancy about some of their
students. Then the researchers simply sat back and watched. At the
end of the year, they administered another IQ test.
What happened? Those students whom the teachers falsely be-
lieved to be bloomers had indeed gotten smarter, making signifi-
cantly larger gains in IQ than the children not labeled bloomers.The
process by which such expectations or stereotypes lead people to treat
others in a way that makes them confirm their expectations is called
a self-fulfilling prophecy. We will encounter this phenomenon sev-
eral times in the following chapters. A self-fulfilling prophecy occurs
when we act on our impressions of others. So how did the teachers’
expectations turn into increased intelligence among the students la-
beled as bloomers? When teachers see potential in their students
they create a warmer “climate” for them (both verbally and nonver-
bally); they give those students more attention, more critical feed-
back, and more opportunities to respond.These are conditions under
which just about anyone would make gains in intellectual ability. In
short, their belief in the student’s potential for growth—whether true
or false—leads them to create the optimal conditions for the student
to grow.

Seeing Relationships Where There Are None: The Illu-
sory Correlation Still another effect of categorization is that we
frequently perceive a relationship between two entities that we think
should be related— but, in fact, they are not. Social psychologists
have dubbed this the illusory correlation. Let me illustrate what I
mean by describing an experiment by David Hamilton and his col-
47
leagues. In this experiment, subjects read 24 statements that de-
scribed different persons by their name, their occupation, and two