Research conducted in the 1960s by Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal and his colleagues shows convincingly how this occurs in the classroom. In this study, teachers were told that, based on sophisticated psychological testing, certain of their pupils were “bloomers” who would show remarkable intellectual gains over the course of the school year. What the teachers were not told was that the tests were fake and that the students had been selected randomly. Despite this, the “bloomers” did end up showing greater intellectual gains than their “non-bloomer” classmates. When teachers were
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