CET-6 Listening Lectures: The Pygmalion Effect and the Spotlight Effect

Recording One.

Can a teacher's expectations actually change how well a child does?

In the 1960s, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson set out to test this idea.

At a primary school in California, they gave all the children an intelligence test.

They then told the teachers that some children were about to make rapid progress.

In fact, those children had been chosen completely at random.

Eight months later, many of these children had made bigger gains in their scores!

The effect was strongest among the youngest pupils.

The teachers, it seems, gave them more attention and encouragement without realising it.

However, later studies have found the effect to be real, but usually much smaller.

Questions sixteen to eighteen are based on the recording you have just heard.

Question sixteen. How were the children expected to make rapid progress chosen?

Question seventeen. Which children showed the strongest effect?

Question eighteen. What have later studies found about the effect?

Recording Two.

Have you ever spilt coffee on your shirt and felt that everyone was staring at you?

Psychologists call this feeling the spotlight effect.

In 2000, Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues at Cornell University put it to the test.

They asked students to wear an embarrassing T-shirt into a room full of people.

The students guessed that about half the room had noticed the shirt.

In reality, only about a quarter had!

We overestimate how much others notice us, because we are the centre of our own world.

Everyone else is too busy worrying about their own shirt.

So next time you make a small mistake in public, relax. Hardly anyone saw it.

Questions nineteen to twenty-one are based on the recording you have just heard.

Question nineteen. What did the researchers ask the students to do?

Question twenty. How did the students' guesses compare with reality?

Question twenty-one. Why do people overestimate how much others notice them?