“Book Reviews § Experimenter Effects In Behavioral Research, Rosenthal1976”, Gwern2013-08-23 ()⁠:

A compilation of books reviews of books I have read since ~1997.

Review of a major and widely-cited psychology monograph purporting to demonstrate pervasive and powerful effects of social expectations and settings and the general environment on all aspects of human psychology, experimentation, and research, even to the point of the ‘Pygmalion effect’ proving that teacher expectations can boost student IQs by hundreds of points.

The Pygmalion effect was based on impossible data, was defended by statistical malpractice, and repeatedly failed to replicate, and this exemplifies the problem with Rosenthal’s research and the book as a whole: despite its appearance of extreme rigor and concern for bias, it is clear that the results actually exemplify the Replication Crisis and that almost none of his research is reliable, bogus from beginning to end, and the results were designed to serve ideological goals despite the intrinsic absurdity of the claims, and inconsistency with basic observations of human stability & consistency, predictive power of individual differences, and impotence of environmental interventions.