“Are You Really Measuring Their Intelligence?”
In the early 1900s, an extraordinary horse took large amount of public interest due to its animal intelligence. This horse was believed to be taught arithmetic by the owner Wilhelm Von Osten since he was able to count numbers given in front of him by stomping his foot. Thus, the name “Clever Hans” was given. People soon became suspicious, and wondered if the trainer was giving him a secret signal. However, “Clever Hans” could count numbers even without the presence of his trainer. After formal investigation in 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that Hans was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reactions of his human observers. In other words, “Clever Hans” was responding to the expectancy of the questioner, as subtly and unintentionally communicated.
This is how it works: after asking the question, the questioner looked at the horse which gave the cue for “Clever Hans” to start stomping. Then, the questioner made a reaction when Hans came to a right answer. Thus, he stopped stomping. Hans was simply reading the expectancy of the questioner, and responding to it.
This brings up the question of self-fulfilling prophecy. The textbook definition gives that it is the “tendency for people to act in ways that bring about the very thing they expect to happen”. This idea was brought up again later in the years by Rosenthal and Lawson.
These researchers had undergraduate students in a research class to run studies with rats. The students were told to train the rats and work on animal learning theory. Half of the students were told their rats were bred to be “bright” (ex. smart). The other half were told their rats were bred to be “dull” (ex. dumb). In truth, all the rats were the same. However, so-called “bright” rats ended up performing better. The students who had been told their rats were “bright” were more interested and enthusiastic, and handled their rats more. More interestingly, when study was explained in debriefing, students with “dull” condition did not believe that their rats were not in fact bred for dullness. Since the students have been primed with the words “bright” and “dull”, they had expectancies. As a result, the students influenced the rats.
Self-fulfilling prophecy is “a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true” — American sociologist Robert K. Merton
So how about humans? Will their performance be affected by the belief of others? Rosenthal and Jacobson’s research group measured children’s IQ at start of the year. The researchers told the teachers that some children were, according to the test, “late bloomers” — meaning that the child starts slow, but becomes very smart within time. However, this was not true. The children were randomly picked to be labelled as so-called “late bloomers”. Surprisingly, children, who were “late-bloomers”, actually ended up with higher IQ scores at the end of the year. Studies showed that teachers were more positively engaged with these students, and somewhat negative towards any control students who showed improvements. This gives a clear example of self-fulfilling effects in our daily lives.
We know about the belief-confirming effects of schemas, conformation bias, and motivated cognition. All of these involve biases in perceiving reality. Maybe, sometimes reality actually does confirm our belief, but only because we have changed the nature of that reality.
