The Golem effect is a psychological phenomenon in which lower expectations placed upon individuals either by supervisors or the individual themselves lead to poorer performance by the individual. This effect is mostly seen and studied in educational and organizational environments. It is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Etymology The effect is named after the golem, a clay creature that was given life by Rabbi Loew of Prague in Jewish mythology. According to the legend, the golem was originally created to protect the Jews of Prague from the horrors of Blood Libel; however, over time, the golem grew more and more corrupt to the point of spiraling violently out of control and had to be destroyed. The effect was named after the golem legend in 1982 by Babad, Inbar, and Rosenthal because it "represent[s] the concerns of social scientists and educators, which are focused on the negative effects of self-fulfilling prophecies".
Process The Golem effect has very similar underlying principles to its theoretical counterpart, the Pygmalion effect. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson's Pygmalion in the Classroom and further experiments have shown that expectations of supervisors or teachers affect the performance of their subordinates or students. The most thoroughly studied situations of this effect are classrooms. When arbitrarily informed that a particular student is "bright" or "dull", not only will the supervisor's behavior change to favor the "bright" students (as indicated by more praise or attention), the students themselves will exhibit behaviors in line with their labels (such as the "bright" students leaning more forward in their chairs relative to the "dull" students). While the Pygmalion effect and the majority of studies focus on the positive side of this phenomenon, the Golem effect is the negative corollary. Supervisors with negative expectations will produce behaviors that impair the performance of their subordinates while the subordinates themselves produce negative behaviors. This mechanism is an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy: the idea that self-held beliefs can come true in reality. When both supervisor and subordinate notice the low performance, the negative expectations are confirmed and the belief is reinforced. Up until Babad, Inbar, and Rosenthal, studies on teacher/supervisor expectancy and its effect on performance had primarily focused on the Pygmalion effect. Babad actually investigated the effect in his 1977 paper looking at developmentally challenged students but his 1982 paper is considered the seminal Golem effect article due to its more generalizable student population. As opposed to other past teacher-student expectancy studies, the authors asked their teachers to nominate three high-expectancy and three low-expectancy students out of each class instead of just high-expectancy nominations and a control group. In addition to replicating the findings of previous Pygmalion effect studies, the authors found support for the Golem effect. Teachers who were susceptible to biasing information treated their low-expectancy students more dogmatically than their high-expectancy students. Consequently, low-expectancy students performed worse than their high-expectancy counterparts. Teachers who were not susceptible to bias did not show any distinctions in behavior between high and low-expectancy students. Although the majority of research looking at the Golem effect has focused on educational contexts, the effect has also been studied in the workplace. A study by Schrank that predated the Rosenthal and Jacobson article looked at US Air Force Academy airmen. The author induced a "labeling effect" by randomly assigning incoming freshmen to one of five class sections supposedly designating ability levels. McNatt performed a meta-analysis on studies with workplace samples and found that the Golem (and Pygmalion) effects still hold true to around the same magnitude at the workplace as they do in the classroom. Furthermore, the Golem effect can influence entire organizations, not just supervisors and their direct subordinates.
Absolute and relative Davidson and Eden suggested there are two different types of Golem effects: absolute and relative. The absolute Golem effect occurs when the individuals who are identified as the low tier of their group are in fact underqualified for their group. For any given normal distribution of students or employees, this may be the case; there will be some individuals who do not meet the performance standards of the group. However, the more potentially dangerous type of effect is the relative Golem effect. In this case, the entire population is qualified to be in the group. However, because there will always be a "lower tier" even for a group of individuals who meet all of the performance standards of the group, the Golem effect could potentially degrade the performance of even highly skilled individuals. Davidson and Eden suggested a number of "de-Golemization" efforts such as convincing the group that the initial performance measures underestimate true potential in order to reduce this threat.
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