Robert Rosenthal

Who they are

Rosenthal's best-known study is the one Adam Alter retells in Drunk Tank Pink (2013). Teachers at an elementary school, which Alter calls Oak School, were told that certain pupils were academic bloomers. The pupils had in fact been chosen at random. Alter reports that the first and second graders among them outscored their classmates by ten to fifteen IQ points at the retest.

That headline has been qualified repeatedly. Lee Jussim and Kent Harber's 2005 review puts the average whole-school difference at about four IQ points and notes that it was significant in only some grades, mainly the first and second. Robert L. Thorndike's 1968 review of the book argued that the testing was too unreliable to carry the conclusion. Stephen Raudenbush's 1984 meta-analysis of eighteen later experiments found an average effect of about a tenth of a standard deviation, close to zero where teachers had known their pupils for more than two weeks.

Rosenthal did not stop at the original claim. He is the last author on Rubie-Davies, Peterson, Sibley and Rosenthal (2015), a randomised trial in which teachers were trained in the practices of high-expectation teaching, not given false labels to act on. The vault's own note on him keeps an irony worth stating plainly: the researcher associated with experimenter expectancy produced a famous result that later work suggests may have been smaller than first reported.

Key papers

Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1966). Teachers' expectancies: Determinants of pupils' IQ gains. Psychological Reports, 19(1), 115-118. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1966.19.1.115

Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the Classroom. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Rubie-Davies, C. M., Peterson, E. R., Sibley, C. G., & Rosenthal, R. (2015). A teacher expectation intervention: Modelling the practices of high expectation teachers. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 40, 72-85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2014.03.003

Key ideas

The Pygmalion effect. Expectations held by a teacher or manager can change the performance of the person they are held about. The best summary of the evidence is that the effect exists and is small, and that it is strongest when the person holding the expectation has not yet formed a view of their own.

Experimenter expectancy. The vault records Rosenthal as the originator of the idea that researchers who expect a result can nudge towards it without meaning to. It is part of the background to the replication debates.

What this page does not claim. Rosenthal's wider career, affiliations and honours were not verified for this page, and the account above is limited to the Oak School study, its critics and the 2015 trial.

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