KEITH ENRIQUEZ/Daily Bruin Senior Staff Ex-Harvard
Professor Robert Rosenthal spoke in Franz Hall
Wednesday night.
By Lisa Klassen
Daily Bruin Reporter
Distinguished professor and psychologist Robert Rosenthal
addressed research expectations during a special lecture Wednesday
night.
The lecture was hosted by the UCLA Psychology Alumni Association
and was this year’s installment of the psychology
department’s Annual Distinguished Alumni Lecture Series.
Rosenthal, a professor and UCLA alumnus, addressed his findings
regarding how research expectations often influence research
results.
According to his colleagues, Rosenthal’s research has had
a major impact on the psychology and science fields, leading some
to question traditional methods of experimentation.
“His research had a profound effect on helping people to
reach their potential,” said Steven Sevigny, a sixth-year
psychology student. “It shook the psychology world and also
helped teachers to realize the power that they have to facilitate
or inhibit their students learning.”
After earning a Ph.D. from UCLA in psychology, Rosenthal taught
at the University of North Dakota. For 37 years, he taught at
Harvard University, and he later became the chair of the psychology
department. Since 1999, he has taught psychology and conducted
research at the University of California, Riverside.
As a graduate student, Rosenthal studied interpersonal
non-verbal communications and how communication influenced
expectations and outcomes.
Rosenthal’s first significant experiment testing the
phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophesy, took place while he was
working at the University of North Dakota.
Rosenthal enlisted a group of volunteer test subjects to
participate in the experiment.
In these so-called empathy experiments, researchers read
subjects instructions and asked them to interpret the expressions
of several people in different photographs.
Beforehand, the researchers were told that certain people were
good interpreters of positive emotions and others of negative
emotions. Rosenthal wanted to see if this knowledge would influence
how the test subjects performed.
“The students lived up to the expectations of the
experimenters,” Rosenthal said. “The results were even
more profound when we repeated the test with a tape recorder. We
were surprised.”
After publishing an article about this research, Rosenthal had
the opportunity to study the phenomenon at an elementary school in
San Francisco.
“I got a call from Leonore Jacobson,” Rosenthal
said. “She had read my article and told me that if I wanted
to test my theory, that I should come to her school.”
The way in which classes were set up at Jacobson’s school,
with three skill levels in each of the six grades, made it ideal
for controlled research. With help from school administrators,
Rosenthal created a test that they told teachers was designed to
measure intelligence.
The students were given the test. The following year, their new
teachers were told that certain randomly selected students were
“late bloomers” who would do well the following year.
At the end of that year, the students were given the same test.
When Rosenthal compared the test results, he was astonished by
his findings.
“We found that there were significant improvements made by
the students who were expected to bloom compared to the control
group,” Rosenthal said. “Their teachers also thought
that the students with higher test scores were more socially and
emotionally developed.”
After the same test was replicated by other psychologists,
trends relating to racial and gender biases emerged.
“The test also showed how we all have expectations of
gender,” Sevingy said. “The whole study showed how we
condition students without even knowing it.”
Rosenthal said further analysis of his test results showed that
many teachers seemed to prefer African American students who were
average to those who were smart, and also to favor smart white
students.
Concerned with these findings, educators undertook their own
studies, said Ron Dietel, a spokesman for the Center for Research
on Evaluation Standards and Students Testing.
“Teachers need to have high expectations,” Dietel
said. “We’ve done our own studies that prove that
students perform better when their teachers expect them to do
well.”
Whether all teachers have these expectations and whether enough
motivated teachers are teaching, is debatable, Dietel said.
Rosenthal’s research may have the potential to rock the
entire scientific community, but there are some psychologists like
Theodore Barber, who question the validity of his research.
According to Barber, Rosenthal’s method of metanalysis,
examining large quantities of data and basing all conclusions on
that analysis, is not reliable and often yields overgeneralized
results.
“We don’t know exactly what cues students get from
their teachers,” Rosenthal said. “We need to be careful
““ we don’t know what to do to improve motivation and we
don’t know how to apply this information yet.”