The Pygmalion Effect
The Basic Idea
A common storyline in movies is that of the bad-boy jock: he does poorly in his academics and skirmishes with all his teachers, except one. The teacher who believes in him when nobody else does upturns his life trajectory – and he usually ends up in a reputable college as a direct result.
Although cliché, there’s a lot of truth to the storyline described above. When people don’t believe in us, we tend not to believe in ourselves. Conversely, when someone expects more from us, we work harder in order to meet those expectations. Our tendency to live up to someone’s expectations is known as the Pygmalion Effect. We commonly see The Pygmalion Effect in academic or work settings because students and subordinates are expected to live up to their teachers’ and bosses’ expectations.
Leaders should always expect the very best of those around them. They know that people can change and grow.
– American scholar and organizational expert, Warren G. Bennis
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
