Lenore F Jacobson was principal of an elementary school in the South
San Francisco
San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...
Unified School District in 1963 when she started a correspondence with
Harvard
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher lear ...
psychologist
Robert Rosenthal which led to the influential
Pygmalion Effect
The Pygmalion effect is a psychological phenomenon in which high expectations lead to improved performance in a given area. It is named after the Greek myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell so much in love with the perfectly beautiful statue he ...
study.
Jacobson, who had earned an
MA at
California State University, Sacramento
California State University, Sacramento (CSUS, Sacramento State, or informally Sac State) is a public university in Sacramento, California, United States. Founded in 1947 as Sacramento State College, it is part of the California State Universit ...
in 1951, wrote to Rosenthal after he published a paper in
American Scientist
''American Scientist'' (informally abbreviated ''AmSci'') is an American bimonthly science and technology magazine published since 1913 by Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society. In the beginning of 2000s the headquarters was moved to ...
about the effect of researchers' expectations on their subjects in psychological experiments. In the article he mentioned the possibility that a similar
self-fulfilling prophecy A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that comes true at least in part as a result of a person's belief or expectation that the prediction would come true. In the phenomena, people tend to act the way they have been expected to in order to mak ...
might be at work between teachers and students. After they had started to correspond, Jacobson offered Rosenthal her assistance and they agreed to collaborate on a study at her school. The experimental design for this research was finalised when Rosenthal went to San Francisco to meet Jacobson for the first time in 1964.
They published their findings in ''Psychological Reports'', 1966, vol. 19. This led to the publication of ''
Pygmalion in the Classroom'' in 1968.
Seven years later Jacobson and Paul M. Insel published ''What do you expect?: An inquiry into self-fulfilling prophecies'' (California 1975).
Sources
*Robert Rosenthal, ''The Pygmalion Effect and its Mediating Mechanisms'' in ''Improving Academic Achievement: Impact of Psychological Factors on Education'' ed. Joshua Aronson (2002)
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
People from South San Francisco, California
California State University, Sacramento alumni
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