What You Expect is What You Get Intelligence, Cognition, and Memory In the early 1900s a theory came about off an idea that subjects could possibly be influenced to lean a certain way in a study by the experimenter. A study was conducted in which to prove a theory that these subjects are unconsciously influenced by the experimenter. This idea first developed because of a famous horse in 1911 who could supposedly answer questions or solve equations. But what they soon came to discover after analyzing this horse is that the horse’s owner was giving the horse a certain look when the horse would begin to approach the correct answer in front of him, therefore leading to the horse to stop and place his hoof on that answer.
Many studies had gone on following the discovery of how this horse learned to know what he did and the
T h e o r y d e v el o p e d th at maybe sometimes a subject will be favored because of a predetermined impression or idea, and then resulting in guiding that subject in a direction in the experiment unintentionally. Theoretical Propositions Further down the road studies were done in the schooling system with young children and teachers. There was a theory that students who scored higher IQ scores would be unintentionally treated differently or favored by their teachers. They conducted a study where they used an elementary school and tested the students K-6, gave them a test at the beginning of the year, and would study the theory throughout the year. They then told the teachers that this test would serve as a predictor of academic blooming or spurting. Following the test the results they gave the teachers scores and gave them names of the students who had scored in the top 20%, even those these student names were actually just chosen at random and not based on scores.
Results Following the year of schooling that had gone by the students were given the test again. The same students who were projected to have scored the highest, had higher 8% higher scores than the other students. The real importance of the study relates to the potential longlasting effects of teachers’ expectations on the scholastic performance of students. In 1974 a similar study was done, where experimenters had placed cameras in the classrooms and they began to study the behavior of the teachers with those specific students who they thought had scored the higher scores. They began to notice that throughout the course of the school year the teacher would smile to those specific students more often, or look at them more, ask them more questions or even gave those students more eye contact. Following these studies there are still studies today based around this same theory and experiment.