Another case of the SFPs
" ...the parents and their children were watching their land and their livelihood disappear behind Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's new eight-meter-high security fence, which has been erected throughout the country.
The driver of the bulldozer, an Israeli, said to them afterward, 'For every tree I pulled out of the ground, it was like killing a person. It tore at my heart, but I am under orders.'"
-Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan,
Moderator for the World Conference
on Religion and Peace
April 7, 2004
The horse that knew
Around the turn of the last century the most remarkable horse in history was born. He could perform a number of seemingly remarkable intellectual feats. He could add, subtract, multiply and divide, work with integers as well as fractions, read, spell, and identify and relate musical tones. Although many animals had been taught to perform such tricks before, they usually had to be cued by their trainers. But clever Hans could answer questions for everyone, not just those of his master, one Mr. von Osten.
Oskar Pfungst, in collaboration with the Berlin psychologist Carl Stumpf, carried out a series of controlled experiments to ascertain just what was actually happening. The landmark psychological study and its surprising findings were translated into English in 1911 as Clever Hans (The Horse of Mr. von Osten).
The results indicated that Clever Hans was successful only when he had visual access to the questioner and that, in addition, the horse depended on the questioner knowing the correct answer. When the questioner didnt know the answer the horse failed miserably. Taken together, these findings suggested to Pfungst that the questioners were providing visual cues to which Clever Hans was sensitive. The horses intellectual achievements were due not to a miracle of independent thought, but to external cues.
Pfungst found that the relevant visual cues were provided by unconscious, involuntary movements and minute changes in posture on the part of the questioner. As Clever Hans got closer to the correct response the questioner's tension level would go up. At the moment the horse gave the correct answer, tension release would yield a tiny, involuntary movement in the questioner-and this movement was all Clever Hans needed to tell him that the task had been completed.
Pfungst then decided to take on the role of Clever Hans himself. He invited subjects into the laboratory, connected them to an apparatus measuring both head movement and respiration, and instructed them to ask questions. Like Clever Hans, Pfungst responded by tapping. The results were overwhelming: over 90 percent of the subjects tested provided Pfungst with unintentional visual cues for the cessation of response, cues of which they were wholly unaware. Furthermore, these cues consisted of the same kinds of movements and changes in posture that had been noted in those questioning Clever Hans.
Pfungst concluded that his tension hypothesis had been supported. In honor of this achievement, psychologists later referred to the fact that a subject's behavior may be influenced by subtle and unintentional cueing on the part of a questioner and that this cueing may reflect the experimenter's own expectations as the 'Clever Hans Effect.'
The prophecies
The Clever Hans or Pygmalion Effect concepts were later broadened by R.K. Merton, the distinguished American sociologist, who provided the modern term in his 1948 article for The Antioch Review, entitled The self-fulfilling prophecy. Simply put, our expectations about other individuals and future events lead us to behave in particular ways that, on occasion, can cause the expected event to occur. In other words, we not only tend to find what we are looking for but even more than that we may even tend, unwittingly, to create what we seek.
In his 1957 book entitled "Social Theory and Social Structure," Merton said that the self-fulfilling prophecy occurs when "a false definition of the situation evokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true." Once the expectation is set-even if it isn't accurate-we tend to act in ways that are consistent with that expectation. Then, surprisingly, that expectation becomes true as a direct result of our actions.
In 1963 Robert Rosenthal, a professor of social psychology at Harvard, published a paper in the American Scientist that summarized evidence that experimenters' expectations might affect the responses obtained from their research subjects within the context of the psychological experiment. He ended that paper by suggesting that the same type of self-fulfilling prophecy might operate in the classroom, so that the expectations teachers have for the performance of their pupils might actually affect those pupils' intellectual performance.
Far from trivial
In a classic experiment, Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson worked with elementary school children from 18 classrooms. They randomly chose 20 percent of the children from each room and told the teachers they were intellectual bloomers'. They explained that these children could be expected to show remarkable gains during the year. The experimental children showed average IQ gains of two points in verbal ability, seven points in reasoning and four points in overall IQ. By 1980 over 345 well-documented studies proved, beyond doubt, that self-fulfilling prophesies not only occur, but that the average size of their effects is far from trivial.
Fuel in the engine
Last week The Guardian newspaper in the UK reported that a new book by BBC broadcaster James Naughtie is about to be released. In it, Naughtie states that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell described neo-conservatives in the Bush administration as '-ing crazies' during the build-up to the war in Iraq. The 'crazies' are said to be Vice President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. They, along with their Christian Fundamentalist brethren, believe that the Third World War will be between religions. And in fact, they have been doing their best to make it a "Self-Fulfilling Prophecy." The situation is little different than what the experiments of Pfungst and Stumpf and Rosenthal and Jacobsen showed us. And the Flour Power generation that leads the destiny of Poland, of you and your children, is colluding with them. Cycles repeat.
The driver of the bulldozer, an Israeli, said to them afterward, 'For every tree I pulled out of the ground, it was like killing a person. It tore at my heart, but I am under orders.'"
-Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan,
Moderator for the World Conference
on Religion and Peace
April 7, 2004
The horse that knew
Around the turn of the last century the most remarkable horse in history was born. He could perform a number of seemingly remarkable intellectual feats. He could add, subtract, multiply and divide, work with integers as well as fractions, read, spell, and identify and relate musical tones. Although many animals had been taught to perform such tricks before, they usually had to be cued by their trainers. But clever Hans could answer questions for everyone, not just those of his master, one Mr. von Osten.
Oskar Pfungst, in collaboration with the Berlin psychologist Carl Stumpf, carried out a series of controlled experiments to ascertain just what was actually happening. The landmark psychological study and its surprising findings were translated into English in 1911 as Clever Hans (The Horse of Mr. von Osten).
The results indicated that Clever Hans was successful only when he had visual access to the questioner and that, in addition, the horse depended on the questioner knowing the correct answer. When the questioner didnt know the answer the horse failed miserably. Taken together, these findings suggested to Pfungst that the questioners were providing visual cues to which Clever Hans was sensitive. The horses intellectual achievements were due not to a miracle of independent thought, but to external cues.
Pfungst found that the relevant visual cues were provided by unconscious, involuntary movements and minute changes in posture on the part of the questioner. As Clever Hans got closer to the correct response the questioner's tension level would go up. At the moment the horse gave the correct answer, tension release would yield a tiny, involuntary movement in the questioner-and this movement was all Clever Hans needed to tell him that the task had been completed.
Pfungst then decided to take on the role of Clever Hans himself. He invited subjects into the laboratory, connected them to an apparatus measuring both head movement and respiration, and instructed them to ask questions. Like Clever Hans, Pfungst responded by tapping. The results were overwhelming: over 90 percent of the subjects tested provided Pfungst with unintentional visual cues for the cessation of response, cues of which they were wholly unaware. Furthermore, these cues consisted of the same kinds of movements and changes in posture that had been noted in those questioning Clever Hans.
Pfungst concluded that his tension hypothesis had been supported. In honor of this achievement, psychologists later referred to the fact that a subject's behavior may be influenced by subtle and unintentional cueing on the part of a questioner and that this cueing may reflect the experimenter's own expectations as the 'Clever Hans Effect.'
The prophecies
The Clever Hans or Pygmalion Effect concepts were later broadened by R.K. Merton, the distinguished American sociologist, who provided the modern term in his 1948 article for The Antioch Review, entitled The self-fulfilling prophecy. Simply put, our expectations about other individuals and future events lead us to behave in particular ways that, on occasion, can cause the expected event to occur. In other words, we not only tend to find what we are looking for but even more than that we may even tend, unwittingly, to create what we seek.
In his 1957 book entitled "Social Theory and Social Structure," Merton said that the self-fulfilling prophecy occurs when "a false definition of the situation evokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true." Once the expectation is set-even if it isn't accurate-we tend to act in ways that are consistent with that expectation. Then, surprisingly, that expectation becomes true as a direct result of our actions.
In 1963 Robert Rosenthal, a professor of social psychology at Harvard, published a paper in the American Scientist that summarized evidence that experimenters' expectations might affect the responses obtained from their research subjects within the context of the psychological experiment. He ended that paper by suggesting that the same type of self-fulfilling prophecy might operate in the classroom, so that the expectations teachers have for the performance of their pupils might actually affect those pupils' intellectual performance.
Far from trivial
In a classic experiment, Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson worked with elementary school children from 18 classrooms. They randomly chose 20 percent of the children from each room and told the teachers they were intellectual bloomers'. They explained that these children could be expected to show remarkable gains during the year. The experimental children showed average IQ gains of two points in verbal ability, seven points in reasoning and four points in overall IQ. By 1980 over 345 well-documented studies proved, beyond doubt, that self-fulfilling prophesies not only occur, but that the average size of their effects is far from trivial.
Fuel in the engine
Last week The Guardian newspaper in the UK reported that a new book by BBC broadcaster James Naughtie is about to be released. In it, Naughtie states that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell described neo-conservatives in the Bush administration as '-ing crazies' during the build-up to the war in Iraq. The 'crazies' are said to be Vice President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. They, along with their Christian Fundamentalist brethren, believe that the Third World War will be between religions. And in fact, they have been doing their best to make it a "Self-Fulfilling Prophecy." The situation is little different than what the experiments of Pfungst and Stumpf and Rosenthal and Jacobsen showed us. And the Flour Power generation that leads the destiny of Poland, of you and your children, is colluding with them. Cycles repeat.
