The Galatea effect is named after Greek mythological story of Pygmalion and Galatea. It is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby an individual’s actual performance or completion of a task is affected by his or her belief and trust in his or her abilities and potential for success. When an individual holds a belief and has confidence that he or she will be able to perform good, this self-belief in turn leads to actual success. What happens is that expectations themselves work as self-fulfilling prophecies. Just like in the Pygmalion effect, where a teacher’s high expectations from his or her pupil leads to high performance, the Galatea effect impacts individuals’ ability to finish a task, meet deadlines and also their ability to work as a team.
The Pygmalion Effect
The Pygmalion effect refers to the phenomenon in which a person’s performance is enhanced when greater expectation is placed on him. The phenomenon is mostly seen in children, students or employees. It is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby an individual behaves the way others expect him or her to and thereby making the prediction to become true. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore F. Jacobson conducted the famous experiment on this phenomenon and published it in a book entitled Pygmalion in the Classroom (1986). In the experiment, experimenters conducted standard IQ test on children of an elementary school at the beginning of an academic year, and selected 20 per cent (about five children per class) at random, and told their teachers that the tests suggested that these children were potential academic ‘spurters’ who could be expected to show unusual intellectual gains in the year ahead. When the children were retested at the end of academic year, the ‘spurters’ showed massive IQ gains relative to the other children, especially in the first and second grades (6-7-year-old children). These gains were presumably due to subtle effects of the teachers’ expectations on the way they handled the children.
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