The Physiology of Faith by N. Fakhr - HTML preview

The Pygmalion Effect

Pygmalion was a legendary Greek sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had created.

Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson conducted a study designed to show that when teachers have high expectations of their students, those expectations and positive perceptions can contribute to better performance and greater academic progress—and that the reverse may also be true.

In other words, what other people say about us, and the way they define or perceive us, can become something that we ourselves accept and believe. A positive view of us may encourage us to work harder to live up to it. Conversely, a negative view may cause us to give up trying because we come to believe that we are simply incapable of succeeding in that area.

Different societies contain stereotypes or schemas, often rooted in tradition and religion, that define particular social groups, men and women, or sometimes society and human beings as a whole. Such stereotypes can influence people's abilities and the extent to which their potential is actually realized.

In a study conducted in 1998, women and men were first asked to wear loose-fitting clothes that did not reveal the shape of their bodies. They were then asked to solve mathematics problems. Next, they were asked to put on swimsuits and complete another set of mathematics problems. In the second condition, the women's mathematics scores declined compared with their first test, whereas the men's scores remained unchanged.

The researchers interpreted these results as suggesting that wearing a swimsuit made the women more conscious of their gender. Given the social stereotype that women are less capable at mathematics, this heightened self-awareness may have unconsciously undermined their confidence and, consequently, their performance on the mathematics problems. [1]

In another study conducted by Nalini Ambady, involving Asian American girls from elementary through high school, researchers found that when the girls were reminded of their Asian identity before taking a mathematics test—for example, by being asked to talk about the food and culture of their heritage—their math scores were higher than those of the control group. In the United States, there is a widespread stereotype that Asians have greater mathematical ability. But when the girls were reminded of their gender before the test through questions such as what kinds of clothes they liked, their scores fell below those of the control group. This effect was observed among girls from the age of six onward. [2]

In another study involving Black and White men, participants were asked to take part in a golf test. The first group was told that the test was intended to measure their sports intelligence. In this group, White participants performed better than Black participants.

The second group was told that the test was intended to measure their natural athletic ability. They then performed the same task. This time, Black participants performed better than White participants.

It appeared that the stereotypes that White people are more intelligent than Black people and that Black people are physically more capable than White people had caused the activation of these social stereotypes to influence performance, leading participants unconsciously to fulfill the expectations associated with them. [3]

Religions offer various definitions of different groups of people. These definitions can become embedded in the minds of believers and in the broader religious society, and people themselves may then help bring those definitions into reality. In other words, such definitions may encourage the development of certain traits while preventing the potential of other groups from being fully realized.

In this way, a religion’s descriptions of people, or of particular groups of people, may appear to be confirmed by reality and thereby become evidence for the supposed wisdom of that religion’s teachings, since the rules of a religion are often consistent with the way that religion defines different groups of people.

For example, if a religion defines women as less rational and unsuitable for positions such as judgeship, this belief—even in the absence of legal barriers to women’s advancement—may discourage many believing women from studying law or pursuing a judicial career. The resulting large number of women who have not advanced in this field may then appear to believers as evidence confirming the wisdom of what their religion has said about women. They may even try to prevent other women from advancing and breaking this stereotype, while sincerely believing that they are acting with good intentions by saving those pioneering women from wasting their time and energy.

The stereotype—or schema—that our reason is too limited to assess and evaluate divine commands can likewise discourage us, from the outset, from using our own reason to criticize our religious beliefs or to evaluate the morality of our religion’s teachings.

Among Hindus, there is a belief that being born into a particular social class or caste is the result of karma from a previous life and is therefore just and deserved. Accordingly, occupations associated with the higher castes are regarded as inappropriate for members of the lower castes. Although Indian law is secular in this respect and seeks to break down this stereotype, people themselves may contribute to preserving this religious rule, and many may have little desire to enter occupations associated with higher social groups. The stereotypes arising from this religious belief may therefore play some role in the persistence of this phenomenon in India.

In this way, believers may come to feel that their religious rules and laws have been designed in accordance with their “God-given nature,” whereas what they regard as their God-given nature may, to a considerable extent, be the product of their religious stereotypes. In other words, believers accept their religion’s definitions of themselves and unconsciously become what their religion has told them they are. They then praise a God who, in their view, had correctly declared in advance what they were capable of doing and what they were incapable of doing.

In this sense, believers, like Pygmalion, fall in love with a statue they themselves have created—a statue that would never have taken this form without their belief in their religious stereotypes, and without which the women, men, and various groups within their religious society might never have come to resemble so closely the descriptions their religion had given of them.

As we have seen, experiments suggest that as soon as people cease to be reminded of such stereotypes, they may perform differently and display different abilities. For example, the very people who consider their own reason too limited to criticize the teachings and beliefs of their own religion may confidently use that same reason to criticize—and even ridicule—the teachings and beliefs of other religions, while placing full trust in the conclusions they reach.