and with no conscious corrective of unconscious bias—the gap between grades given
to working-class Hannah and to middle-class Hannah increased.
None of the participants was apparently aware that their ‘objective’ opinions
were skewed by unconscious assumptions about class and relative intelligence. It’s
more than possible that they would no longer consciously agree with those
assumptions. They no doubt believed that their judgements were unbiased.
These results demonstrate why, for instance, teachers should not be asked to
grade their own students for certification. They also demonstrate the impossibility of
a claim to class-blindness, gender-blindness, colour-blindness, etc. on an individual,
group, or national level. Centuries of cultural biases—the ‘truths’ that ‘everybody
knew’—don’t disappear because we know better now. They just hang out in our
collective unconscious waiting for their moment in the light. They remain invisible
except by their effects, and even then, only if we’re brave and honest enough to
examine them.
In our own image
The second study, Pygmalion in the Classroom, demonstrates one powerful
negative consequence of those unexamined assumptions by showing the extent to
which teachers’ expectations influence a student’s achievements.
Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson told teachers at a primary school that
they were administering a test to identify ‘academic bloomers’, i.e. those who were
expected to ‘enter a period of intense intellectual development over the following
year’. After the test, the researchers reported that the results showed that specific
students would be ‘bloomers’.
In reality, the test was a regular IQ test, and the ‘bloomers’ were randomly
selected. These students were not in any way distinguished by their test
performances. Nevertheless, a year later when the researchers returned to the
school and administered the same test, the results were ‘astonishing’, as Adam Alter
said in Psychology Today: the ‘bloomers,’ who were no different from their peers a
year ago, ‘now outperformed their unselected peers by 10-15 IQ points’.
The researchers concluded that the teachers, who didn’t realise that they had
been misled, and, under the impression that they were ‘harvesting unseen talent’,
expected more from these students. Those expectations produced ‘a self-fulfilling
prophecy in which the students who were baselessly expected to bloom actually
outperformed their peers’.
The importance of these two studies is enormous. Not only are working-class
students assumed to be markedly less intelligent than their middle-class
counterparts, even when they give identical performances, but teachers’
expectations have a profound effect on student performance. Students, that is, live
up or down to exp