« 25-Word Challenge is a Cookin' | Main | Candy Bar Countries »
April 17, 2005
The Pygmalion Effect
ou can jump to 
8. How the Mind Works
You probably know the story of Pygmalion. Pygmalion was a gifted sculptor from Cyprus who one day found a large, flawless piece of ivory. He sculpted a beautiful woman and found it so lovely he became obsessed with the statue, thinking it his ideal woman. He went to the temple of Aphrodite to plead for a wife who would be as perfect as his statue. When Aphrodite visited the studio of the sculptor while he was away, she was flattered to find that the image was of herself. Aphrodite brought the statue to life, and when Pygmalion returned to his home, he found his ideal had come alive.
In 1968 a study was done by two researchers, Rosenthal and Jacobson. They told teachers they were testing the intelligence of children aged six to twelve years, all drawn from the same school. They then randomly assigned children to two groups. Their teachers were told that the children in one group were "high achievers" even though they were randomly chosen. At the end of the school year, these children showed significant test gains, despite the random allocation to a group.
In short the researchers discovered that the teachers' expectations manifested in the children. That people pick up unconcious clues from others and respond to them.
The subconscious mind stores our picture of ourselves. When we are young, that picture is influenced and reinforced by how people picture us.
This leads to several interesting considerations:
First, be very careful about the negative thoughts you hold of others, especially what you are sure is true about others. Not only will you create blindspots in yourself that will screen out anything that contradicts your truth, you may actually contribute to that negative image in a way that they will adopt.
Second, be very careful about accepting any negative thoughts from other about you as true. Watch your own thoughts to screen out negative characterizations that may hold you back. Other people's opinions of you do not have to be any of your business.
We often carry multiple pictures of ourselves developed based on our current associations. For example: Do you find that when you visit your parents, you become their child again, feeling how their image of you puts you in a box of behaviors that reinforce their picture of you? Do you find that you are a different person--more confident, more capable, more articulate, more witty--around one group of people, and much less confident and capable and articulate and witty around another?
Do you recall being known as a klutz or awkward in high school, and then after many years being a non-klutz away from those acquaintances, when you go back to them, you are suddenly that klutz again? Do you find that when you return to old friends you haven't seen in years you fall into old picture-patterns that you had forgotten about?
Have you ever been with someone, a spouse perhaps, who seems to undergo a personality change when around his or her parents or old friends?
Have you noticed how you change when you are with your church group, your drinking-poker buddies or shopping gals, your coworkers, your neighbors, your political group, your military pals?
Few of us are able to maintain a single pciture of ourselves as we move from peer group to peer group or person to person.
Restrictive Motivation
Once you understand the picture-power of individuals, you can program that picture to avoid knowledge that you don't want them to have. How? By getting them to emotionally, reactively avoid what you don't want them to know.
Restrictive motivation is simple to illustrate. Suppose as a child you had a father who got violent whenever you were late. You're told to be home by 9:00 pm and you walk in at 9:15 and your father yells at you and breaks things. The next time you are late, he yells and slaps you hard. The next time you are late he slaps you hard and locks you in the closet. The next time you are late, he kicks you in the stomach.
After a while, the idea of being late causes you anxiety. You learn to flinch at the thought of being late. You are motivated to do everything possible to be home on time because you know what will happen when you are late.
Years later when your father is no longer around, you can be on the way to a doctor's appointment and you will race a train to the train crossing and risk it just so you won't be late. Even though the actual punishment is no longer present, your subconscious has taken in the habit, the imprint of associating being late with punishment and pain.
Not only will you suffer this anxiety and flinching when you are later, you will experience it when others are late as well. So you become a kind of controller of others when they are late. In order to relieve your own anxiety, you will go overboard you faulting others for being late. Why? Cause deep down a part of you knows that something bad will happen if anyone is late. You export your anxiety and try to control the world in order to alleviate that anxiety.
If I am an accomplished political operative, I can program restrictive motivation in you. If I know that you avoid thinking deeply about hateful people, all I have to do is make sure that I implant a picture that the people who are against my goals are hateful people.
Restricting Rush Limbaugh
For example, I lived in Sacramento, California, when Rush Limbaugh first came to town and tried out his new 3-hour radio format without guests, just his own power as an entertainer and political commentator. Nobody knew about Rush, so nobody had much of a chance to plant a manufactured picture of him before he went on the air.
A friend and I listened to his moderate conservative voice, irreverent humor, and his intelligent political commentary. He was a hit in Sacramento, and within a few years was marked to go national. We knew he would be big.
We also anticipated how he would be attacked as a far-rightwing extremist, a hate-filled conservative. Nothing could be farther from the truth, but the politics is such that implanting that image before people had a chance to hear him would guarantee that a significant portion of the audience wouldn't hear him. And because of the Reticular Activating System, once people were predisposed to be convinced of the "truth" that Rush Limbaugh was extremist and hate-filled and meanspirited, they would filter their experience of him in light of that "truth."
As a side note, and to dispell the myth of Rush as a rightwing Christian extremist, in the 1980s in Sacramento, during the time when Christian evangelists were finding evil lyrics being recorded in reverse on record albums to program the Devil into the nation's youth, Rush decided to expose how ridiculous that was. (Rush's has a DJ's background, and you will notice that many of the entertainment tactics on his show are DJ-oriented).
On a Monday, he announced that to his listeners that Slim Whitman's "Una Paloma Blanca" contained such reversed lyrics. He did not play an example that day, but he seriously assured listeners that Slim Whitman's albums were a danger to the American Way of Life. Christians called up seriously believing Rush. They did not catch on that he was making fun of them.
On Tuesday, he kept the satire going and people still bought it. By Wednesday he brought in an example, which he played on the air. It was ridiculous, with a devilish voice saying, "Well, you found me, Old Beelzebub...etc" People still thought it was real.
On Thursday, finally, readers were calling up saying they knew it was a satire, astonished that the Sacramento evangelical Christian community did not recognize the satire, and finally Rush admitted that he had manufactured the whole thing to make a satirical point.
Rush was not well-liked by those Christians in Sacramento.
Back to Restrictive Motivation. You can recognize this kind of restrictive moticational programming in you whenever you detect that kind of knee-jerk emotional revulsion being triggered. When your "buttons are being pushed." It's like a kind of reactive seizure that pushes you to avoid whatever is causing the seizure.
More to come in 9. How the Mind Works.
*** Why should we bother to reply to Kautski? He would reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply. There's no end to that. It will be quite enough for us to announce that Kautski is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything. Vladimir Lenin
--------
Posted by witnit at April 17, 2005 5:31 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.witnit.org/cgi-bin/mt-t071875.pl/723
