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The Golem effect is the phenomenon where the lower expectations placed upon individuals either by supervisors or the individual themselves, the worse they perform. This effect is mostly seen and studied in educational and organizational environments. It is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Origin of the Golem

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 created to protect the Jews of Prague until the Golem grew to become violently out of control and had to be destroyed. The effect was named after the Golem 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”

The Golem Effect

The Golem effect has the same principles of the Pygmalion effect. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson’s Pygmalion in the Classroom and further experiments have shown that expectations of supervisors or teachers have an impact on the performance of their subordinates or students. The most thoroughly studied situation of this effect are classrooms. When arbitrarily informed that a student is “bright” or “dull” not only will the supervisor’s behavior change to favor the “bright” students (such as 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 negatively impact 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 student 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.

Though the majority of research looking at the Golem effect has focused on educational context, 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 thy do in the classroom. Furthermore, the Golem effect can influence entire organizations, not just supervisors and their direct subordinates.

Absolute and Relative Golem Effects

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 don’t meet the performance standards of the group. The potentially more dangerous type 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.

Psychological Mechanisms

Although the consequences of the Pygmalion/Golem effects are well documented, the mechanisms behind them are more up to debate. Both effects have been argued to stem from Victor Vroom’s expectancy theory. This theory posits that people are more likely to perform behaviors they believe they have a high expectation of performing successfully. In relation to the Golem effect, when expectations are set low by the supervisor, subordinates don’t require as much effort to successfully reach their performance expectation, which consequently results in lower performance. Rowe and O’Brian argued that the Golem effect was a result of transaction cost and agency theories. They posit that because teachers monitor their classes for opportunistic behaviors, some students may take that as a sign that the teacher doesn’t trust them and in turn, engage in opportunistic behavior because it is expected of them. Although there have been proposed models of self-fulfilling prophecies including the Pygmalion/Golem effect Sutton and Woodman, 1989), no model has been empirically tested. This lack of research is especially glaring considering the golem effect is heavily involved with other established motivational theories and organizational behavior concepts such as, self-efficacy, leader-member exchange, and transformational leadership.

Methodological Issues

There is currently a relative paucity of research that directly addresses Golem effects, and an even lesser body that measures and examines it. There are a multitude of reasons cited for this scarcity, but the most common reason involves the ethical concerns raised in examining negative and potentially harmful phenomenon. Specifically, the concern arises in trying to operationalize negative expectancies in individuals, which will theoretically result in their lower performance. The worry then is the possible harmful, lingering effects on research participants beyond the study due to this manipulation. These effects could originate either from having the knowledge that they performed worse than others, that they were manipulated to perform worse, or were viewed negatively by a superior in the research paradigm; on the other hand, participants in a position of superiority that were manipulated to have negative expectancies may feel guilty about treating others differently following the experiment. Whatever the exact impact may be, these concerns have resulted in many researchers only making mention of the golem effect in studies or ignoring it entirely.

The researchers that have still chosen to study Golem effects have gotten around these ethical concerns in several unique ways. For example, Feldman & Prohaska used confederates to elicit negative expectations from subjects acting as students or teachers; by doing so, they avoided the potentially harmful effects of negative expectations on unaware participants. Oz & Eden designed a study in military squad leaders were differentiated by treatment and control conditions. In the treatment condition, squad leaders’ perceptions were manipulated as to believe that low scores on a physical fitness test were not indicative of a subordinate’s ineptitude, whereas the control condition involved no manipulation. Thus, the Golem effect was measured indirectly through theoretically creating a “buffer” from the effect in the treatment condition. Unfortunately, both of the above examples suffer from the fact that the Golem effect is never directly assessed or measured; rather, they are surmised through reasoning or extrapolation from Pygmalion effects.

In contrast to the above examples, there is evidence that the Golem effect is still capable of being directly operationalized and measured. Reynolds designed a study in which support instructors for an introductory management course were led to believe they were assigned either lower-performing or higher-performing students based on a pretest, although the actual assignment was completely random and arbitrary. He was able to demonstrate the Golem effect from this manipulation on a posttest, showing that it is feasible to design studies that measure the effect in a more direct and controlled fashion. However, studies such as this are regrettably still extremely scarce in current psychological research.

Pygmalion in Relation to Golem

Compared to the Golem effect, the Pygmalion effect enjoys a far greater body of literature; this is most likely due to the fact that this research is free from the ethical challenges of examining Golem effects. More specific and involved discussion of the Pygmalion effect is beyond the scope of this article, but several recent studies on this effect are worth mentioning in regards to their implications for the Golem effect and future research.

Cross-Cultural Effects

Recent research has explored the Pygmalion effect in cultural settings not previously studied. For example, a recent study examined how Japanese humanitarian aid workers stationed in different countries across the world perceived and interacted with the local organizations that they consulted with. The researchers found support for the notion that when the aid workers held more positive perceptions of their local colleagues, higher levels of organizational performance were observed. Such findings raise the question of whether Golem effects would also be observed in such multicultural settings and provides ample opportunity for future research inquiry.

Golem in Reverse

Many modern organizations are starting to have to face a new challenge in superior/subordinate relationships: the older employee reporting to a younger supervisor. This particular situation is expected to occur more and more as the baby boomer generation reaches retirement age. As such, there is great opportunity for research in examining the effects of older employees’ expectations and perceptions of younger supervisors, a phenomenon that has been labeled as Reverse Pygmalion. To date, there has been little research on the subject; however, one study found that, compared to younger workers, older workers with younger supervisors expected less out of their supervisors, and consequently rated their leadership behaviors as lower than in other conditions. While this study refers to the effect studied as Reverse Pygmalion, it appears to be also lending credence to the possibility of a Reverse Golem effect existing, in that subordinates’ negative expectations of supervisors may consequently influence supervisor behavior in a negative fashion. However, more research is clearly needed to fully and rigorously test such speculation.

Golem in Group Settings

Lastly, there have been concerns raised about the Pygmalion effect possibly being an artifact of interpersonal contrast effects; by experimentally focusing high expectations on a treatment group, the control group (which typically receives no manipulation in Pygmalion studies) naturally is perceived with lower expectations. As such, the perceived difference between individuals becomes the driving force instead of high expectations alone. However, Eden demonstrated that this concern was not supported through manipulating entire groups (in this case, separate military squads randomly receiving Pygmalion versus control status); he found that the Pygmalion effect was still observed beyond the scope of any contrast effects as evidenced by higher mean performances of groups with leaders that received Pygmalion manipulation when compared to controls. It would be of significant value to the Golem research literature to see whether Golem effects are also unaffected by interpersonal contrast effects through similar group study designs.

Implications

The Golem effect has many implications for various organizational settings, from schools to sports to multi-million dollar corporations. Public education systems are likely to be very familiar with Golem effects in the form of controversy surrounding tracking systems, which have been almost completely abandoned in education today due to their inefficacy and detrimental effects. While tracking systems varied widely from school to school, the message conveyed to many students placed in remedial tracks was that of low expectations, which, in line with Golem research, led to poorer performance and behaviors. There is also great relevance for the Golem effect in sports, where a coach (a superior) must frequently gauge his or her outward displays of expectations towards individual teammates (the subordinate) in order to ensure that he/she is not sending negative messages. Such negative messages have the possibility to impact players’ performance significantly. As such, it is far more ideal for coaches to engender high expectations towards all team members in order to harness the power of the Pygmalion effect.

Finally, there is something to be said about Golem effects towards disenfranchised and stigmatized demographics in society such as the homeless, intellectually disabled, and other groups often looked down upon. Due to the low expectations often cast upon individuals in these groups by society as a whole, there is reason to believe that such individuals suffer from Golem effects in a truly significant and crippling manner. However, there is great hope for such trends to be stopped or even reversed, as evidenced by multiple government and non-profit programs aimed at recognizing and empowering these individuals to succeed in the modern workforce.