Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Research on interpersonal expectations
- Part II Research on the mediation of interpersonal expectations through nonverbal behavior
- 11 The spontaneous communication of interpersonal expectations
- 12 The accurate perception of nonverbal behavior: Questions of theory and research design
- 13 Nonverbal communication of expectancy effects: Can we communicate high expectations if only we try?
- 14 Gender, nonverbal behavior, and expectations
- 15 Expectations in the physician-patient relationship: Implications for patient adherence to medical treatment recommendations
- 16 Comment: Interpersonal expectations, social influence, and emotion transfer
- Part III The study of interpersonal expectations
- Author index
- Subject index
- Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction
11 - The spontaneous communication of interpersonal expectations
from Part II - Research on the mediation of interpersonal expectations through nonverbal behavior
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Research on interpersonal expectations
- Part II Research on the mediation of interpersonal expectations through nonverbal behavior
- 11 The spontaneous communication of interpersonal expectations
- 12 The accurate perception of nonverbal behavior: Questions of theory and research design
- 13 Nonverbal communication of expectancy effects: Can we communicate high expectations if only we try?
- 14 Gender, nonverbal behavior, and expectations
- 15 Expectations in the physician-patient relationship: Implications for patient adherence to medical treatment recommendations
- 16 Comment: Interpersonal expectations, social influence, and emotion transfer
- Part III The study of interpersonal expectations
- Author index
- Subject index
- Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction
Summary
To a graduate student in a program of experimental social psychology in the 1960s, few studies were more significant than Robert Rosenthal's (1966, 1967) analysis of the effects of experimenter expectations in psychological research. It was a revelation: The responses of subjects to carefully defined and manipulated variables could be affected by mysterious forces of covert communication set into motion by subtle and poorly understood expectations. Even in such apparently simple and straightforward experiments as obtaining judgments of photographs of faces and running rats in a maze, the expectations of experimenters were somehow inadvertently leading their subjects to show the responses expected.
Later came another revelation: that such expectations not only affected behavior in the laboratory but also had powerful and significant effects in real life: The Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) demonstration of the power of teachers' expectations in creating self-fulfilling prophecies affecting the achievement and even perhaps the apparent intelligence of their students remains one of the major contributions of the social sciences to our culture, even though our culture, and indeed the social sciences, have yet to respond adequately to its implications. The Rosenthal and Jacobson result created controversy (Jensen, 1969; Thorndike, 1968), but subsequent studies replicated their findings beyond a reasonable doubt (Harris & Rosenthal, 1985; Babad, this volume). Moreover, other studies demonstrated the power of the covert communication process in socially relevant settings: in the vocal patterns of a physician referring patients for further treatment, for example (Milmoe, Rosenthal, Blane, Chafetz, & Wolf, 1967), or in the nonverbal behavior of a judge during a criminal jury trial (Blanck, Rosenthal, & Cordell, 1985; Blanck, this volume).
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- Interpersonal ExpectationsTheory, Research and Applications, pp. 227 - 241Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993
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