Pygmalion Effect

The Pygmalion Effect, or Rosenthal effect, refers to the phenomenon in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, often children or students and employees, the better they perform. The effect is named after Pygmalion, a Cypriot sculptor in a narrative by Ovid in Greek mythology, who fell in love with a female statue he had carved out of ivory.

The Pygmalion effect is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy, and, in this respect, people with poor expectations internalize their negative label, and those with positive labels succeed accordingly. Within sociology, the effect is often cited with regards to education and social class.

he Pygmalion effect also incorporates the idea of self-fulfilling prophecy regarding self-perception. A person who believes he is worthless or has other negative perceptions about his abilities and qualities will usually fulfill his expectations. He will never achieve his true potential but will confine himself within his own negative expectations. People who tend to have a positive self-image and believe they are capable of achieving anything they set out to achieve are usually more likely to do so.

Many studies have been conducted on the Pygmalion effect in the classroom. Teachers were given information that certain students in the class were more likely to excel and achieve than other members of the class. No verbal cues were used by the teacher to inform students of the information or expectations, but students who were believed by tutors to have greater potential still showed significantly greater intellectual growth.

Body language is just as important as verbal communication when conveying both positive and negative expectations, as is tone of voice. The use of body language is most commonly a subconscious form of communication, but it can prove to be very powerful. The response and interpretation of non-verbal signals is also often subconscious and subtle but can be extremely powerful and long-lasting, especially when referring to one person’s expectations of another.

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Book Name:The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock (Louise Smith Bross Lecture Series)
Between life and the art that imitates it is a vague, more shadowy category: images that exist autonomously. Pygmalion’s mythical sculpture, which magnanimous gods endowed with life after he fell in love with it, marks perhaps the first such instance in Western art history of an image that exists on its own terms, rather than simply imitating something (or someone) else. In The Pygmalion Effect, Victor I. Stoichita delivers this living image—as well as its many avatars over the centuries—from the long shadow cast by art that merely replicates reality.

Stoichita traces the reverberations of Ovid’s founding myth from ancient times through the advent of cinema. Emphasizing its erotic origins, he locates echoes of this famous fable in everything from legendary incarnations of Helen of Troy to surrealist painting to photographs of both sculpture and people artfully posed to simulate statues. But it was only with the invention of moving pictures, Stoichita argues, that the modern age found a fitting embodiment of the Pygmalion story’s influence. Concluding with an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock films that focuses on Kim Novak’s double persona in Vertigo, The Pygmalion Effect illuminates the fluctuating connections that link aesthetics, magic, and technical skill. In the process, it sheds new light on a mysterious world of living artifacts that, until now, has occupied a dark and little-understood realm in the history of Western image making.