Golem Effect: What It Is And How It Limits Us Through Expectations
Do you know the Golem effect? Do you know what relationship it has with the Pygmalion effect or with the self-fulfilling prophecy? And with the stereotypes? How has this effect been studied?
If you want to find out the answer to these questions, and above all, if you are passionate about social but also educational psychology… do not hesitate to read the article until the end!
The Golem effect, also called the Negative Pygmalion effect, consists of a phenomenon that we can frame within social psychology. This psychological phenomenon consists of the following: Placing very low expectations on someone (or on oneself) leads to worse performance of the person
Why is this happening? How is it explained? We will see it throughout the article and through a very clear example.
First, but, let’s say that the Golem effect has been studied not only from the point of view of social psychology, but also from educational and organizational psychology. A little later we will talk about the first research that studied the Golem effect, led by Leonore Jacobson and Robert Rosenthal.
So, in other words, what happens in the Golem effect is that One person can condition another person and make them believe that they are not capable of doing something, thus decreasing their self-esteem. This effect, however, often happens unconsciously. However, the consequences for the person who has been “prejudged” can be very negative, because they would be limiting their potential.
To understand this phenomenon a little better, let’s think about an example in the educational field.
If a teacher emphasizes that a student is incapable of carrying out a series of tasks, or of passing his or her subject, it is very likely that this student will stagnate and this “negative prophecy” will actually come true.
Thus, in the Golem effect, teachers’ expectations of their students are based on little information and arise automatically ; These expectations indirectly and unconsciously often cause them to act in a manner consistent with said negative result; That is, your behavior may in part be promoting your student’s negative outcome.
This does not mean that teachers are responsible for school failure of some of their students, far from it, but their behaviors could influence this result because they already have the prior expectation that they will fail.
This is the Golem effect, which can be extrapolated to other areas and situations beyond the academic field, for example when we have very low expectations of someone and these are met (at work, in personal relationships, etc.).
Its relationship with the Pygmalion effect and the self-fulfilling prophecy
The Golem effect has a lot to do with two other phenomena in social psychology: the self-fulfilling prophecy and the Pygmalion effect.
The Pygmalion effect consists of just the opposite to the Golem effect, and that is that the fact of placing high expectations on someone (specifically, on their performance), positively influences their performance, so that it improves. It is for this reason that the Golem effect is also called the Negative Pygmalion effect, because it consists of the opposite effect.
In this way, both in the Pygmalion effect and in the Golem effect, it is maintained that our beliefs in relation to others influence their performance. All of this also has a lot to do with expectations, and from here we can link both phenomena directly with the phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecy.
The self-fulfilling prophecy, for its part, refers to the fact that predicting or believing in something of a psychological nature makes it easier to come true, because we end up developing behaviors that facilitate it. That is, the fact of believing it ends up being the cause of it happening.
What does the research say?
As we have already seen through an example in the educational field, the Golem effect occurs in various areas of life, although especially in the academic field.
But who started studying the Golem effect, along with the Pygmalion effect and the self-fulfilling prophecy? It was Leonore Jacobson, principal of a school in San Francisco (California), and Robert Rosenthal, psychologist, who began a series of investigations into these psychological phenomena.
Through their studies, Jacobson and Rosenthal observed that, unconsciously, many teachers classified their students ; This fact influenced their performance, since, also unconsciously, the teachers facilitated or hindered the implementation of means and behaviors so that their initial “predictions” ended up being fulfilled.
Reflections on this phenomenon
After analyzing the Golem effect, the following question may arise: can this effect be stopped? Although it may be difficult, surely yes. As? Through the task of detect these prior biases in people (for example in teachers) in relation to the abilities or possible performance of other people, or of students, in the case of teachers.
That is, the ideal would be for teachers to believe in all their students and to enhance and stimulate their performance to the same extent (although there will always be students who need more attention).
So we find ourselves with a very complex issue, because in the end we all have expectations, we all have prejudices, We all make predictions based on certain parameters …and our behavior, whether we want it or not, often goes according to these predictions, as if we unconsciously wanted to “be right” (although precisely this behavior is so irrational).
At this point, and after talking about the Golem effect, its characteristics and differences with the self-fulfilling prophecy and the Pygmalion Effect… a very important concept in social psychology may have come to mind: the phenomenon of stereotypes. .
Stereotypes are those pre-established ideas or beliefs that we have in relation to a group or to certain types of people, for example. These are ideas that have been transmitted to us by society, school, family… and that we inherit in our mental imagination.
These ideas are usually erroneous beliefs, because they try to define a group of people according to traits “typically associated” with them, without any type of foundation. An example of a stereotype would be thinking that “all Italians are Latin lovers.”
What relationship does the Goleman effect have with stereotypes? Basically, in a way stereotypes may be playing a causal role in this effect (although not always), since based on them we create ideas in our head in relation to what the performance of a certain person will be like.
On the other hand, as with stereotypes, when the Goleman effect occurs it is because we are creating an idea, or making a prediction, based on little information and almost automatically.
