Understanding Society
The Golem Effect
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Low expectations communicate themselves quietly: less eye contact, greater distance, fewer smiles. Doug uses Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History to define this downward spiral as the Golem Effect, named for Prague’s legendary protector turned monster. Its reach extends beyond individual performance to poor students, homelessness, radicalization, racism, and organizations — each disappointment reinforcing the expectations that helped produce it.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
“The Pygmalion Effect is great science that is undersupplied,” an Israeli psychologist lamented. ‘It hasn’t made the difference it should have in the world, and that’s very disappointing.’ The flip side of the Pygmalion Effect is the Golem Effect, named after the Jewish legend in which a creature meant to protect the citizens of Prague instead turns into a monster. Like the Pygmalion Effect the Golem Effect is ubiquitous. When we have negative expectations about someone, we don’t look at them as often. We distance ourselves from them. Basically we do exactly what Rosenthal’s students did when they released the ‘stupid’ rats into the maze.
Research on the Golem effect is scant, which is not surprising, given ethical objections to subjecting people to negative expectations. But we do know is shocking. Take the study done by the psychologist Wendell Johnson in Davenport, Iowa, in 1939. He split twenty orphans into two groups, telling one group they were good articulate speakers, and the other they were destined to become stutterers. Now infamously known as ‘The Monster Study”, this experiment left multiple individuals with lifelong speech impediments.
The Golem Effect is a type of nocebo: a nocebo that causes poor students to fall further behind, the homeless to lose hope, and isolated teenagers to radicalize. It is also one of the insidious mechanisms because racism, because when you’re subjected to low expectations, you won’t perform at your best, which further diminishes others’ expectations and thus further undermines your performance. There’s also evidence to suggest that the Golem Effect and it vicious cycle of mounting negative expectations can run entire organizations into the ground.