Smashing and worrying experiments about how we can be made by the labels people give us.
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In Israel, 105 soldiers were put into a 15 week intensive commander training programme. Each soldier had a (fake and randomly assigned) previous assessment about his command potential and trainers were given this (fake) information before the session. The trainees did not know that their fake assessments were given to the trainers, and the trainers did not know that the assessments were bogus and randomly given. After 15 weeks, the standard examination to gauge the effectiveness of the programme was administered to all the trainees, and those soldiers (fakely) assessed as "high" command potential scored an average of 79.98, while those assessed as "average" and "unknown" scored averages of 72.45 and 65.18, respectively.
Eden, D. and A. Shani (1982), "Pygmalion Goes to Boot Camp: Expectancy, Leadership and Trainee Performance", J. of Applied Psychology 67, pp.194-99
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51 men and 51 women volunteers participated in a "communication" experiment. Each man was given the CV of a randomly assigned woman and her photo with whom he was to have a telephone conversation. Although the CV was genuine, the photo was not of hers, but the one the experimenters prepared; it was either one of a very pretty woman or one of an ordinary looking woman, randomly assigned. The men were asked to evaluate the women whom they were to talk, in terms of social desirableness, based on the CV and the fake photo. Neither men nor women knew that the men saw fake photos (It does not take a psychologist to guess that the men who saw a photo of a pretty woman would evaluate the women more positively and later engage in telephone conversation more enthusiastically). After the telephone conversations, the experimenters cut all the men's parts from the conversation recordings, leaving just the women's parts. Then further 12 people (who were unrelated with any of the men and women) were asked to listen to these recorded clips (of women's parts) and to evaluate those women based only on the recordings. The result was correlated with the original evaluations made by the men before the conversation.
Snyder, M., E. Decker and E. Bercheid (1977), "Social Perception and Interpersonal Behavior: On the Self-Fulfilling Nature of Social Stereotypes", J. of Personality and Social Psychology 55, pp.656-66.
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Both the episodes are found in Brafman, O. and R. Brafman (2008), Sway, Doubleday