Dov Eden

Who they are

The paper is titled Pygmalion without interpersonal contrast effects: Whole groups gain from raising manager expectations, and it appeared in the Journal of Applied Psychology (1990, 75(4), 394-398). Its starting point was a weakness in earlier Pygmalion studies. If a leader is told that some subordinates are special and others are not, the apparent benefit to the special ones could be partly a contrast effect, produced by treating the rest worse.

Eden's answer was to raise expectations for whole units at once. Platoon-level analysis showed the Pygmalion platoons outperforming the controls, and he concluded that expectation effects do not depend on contrast and that the approach suits interventions for entire groups.

David Robson's The Expectation Effect, according to the vault's audit, treats the very large Israeli effect sizes as exceptional and not to be expected elsewhere. A single paper was read for this page, so nothing is claimed here about the rest of his work.

Key papers

Eden, D. (1990). Pygmalion without interpersonal contrast effects: Whole groups gain from raising manager expectations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 75(4), 394-398. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.75.4.394

Key ideas

Interpersonal contrast. Singling out some people as high potential can flatter the result by implicitly marking down the others. Treating whole groups avoids it.

A randomised field design. Twenty-nine platoons were assigned at random, which is a stronger design than the classroom experiments it followed.

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