Robert Rosenthal, who linked subtle cues to behavior, dies at age 90

Robert Rosenthal, a psychologist known as an expert on nonverbal communication, and in particular what he called the “self-fulfilling prophecies” in which subtle, often unconscious, gestures can influence behavior, died Jan. 5 in Riverside , California. 90.

His daughter Ginny Rosenthal Mahasin said he died in a hospital of an aneurysm.

Dr. Rosenthal, who is widely regarded as one of the leading social psychologists of the 20th century and who spent much of his career at Harvard, was best known for his work in the 1960s on what he called the Pygmalion effect – or , more technically, 'interpersonal behavior'. expectation.”

In a famous experiment, he gave an aptitude test to students at an elementary school in California, then told the teachers that one group of students would prosper in the coming year, while another group would not. In fact, the two groups were selected at random, although the teachers did not know this.

A year later, he tested the students again and found that those in the “blossom” group had gained an average of 27 IQ points regardless of how they initially scored, while the other group performed much worse.

Dr. Rosenthal concluded that student performance was affected by the different ways teachers had treated the two groups, encouraging the first groups with extra help, positive reinforcement and warmer body language. He called it the Pygmalion Effect, after the Greek legend in which a sculptor falls in love with one of his works and brings it to life.

“The bottom line is that if we expect certain behavior from people, we treat them differently,” he told Discover magazine in 2015, “and the treatment is likely to influence their behavior.”

His 1968 book “Pygmalion in the Classroom,” co-written with Lenore Jacobson, the principal of the California school in the study, caused a stir. Some social psychologists have criticized his data. Albert Shanker, the head of New York City's largest teachers union, condemned the organization for blaming teachers.

But over the next decade, researchers accepted it as a model and source of inspiration. In 1978, Dr. Rosenthal and a Harvard colleague, the statistician Donald Rubin, conducted 345 studies that built on his original research, in settings as diverse as doctors' offices, courtrooms, and military training centers—and each of them reaffirmed his findings.

“The same factors are at play with bosses and their employees, with therapists and their clients, or with parents and children,” Dr. Rosenthal to The New York Times in 1986. “The more warmth and the more positive expectations communicated, the better the person receiving these messages will do.

In a related, earlier experiment, he applied his work to himself. As part of his dissertation at the University of California, Los Angeles, he discovered that the way he asked certain questions and behaved toward certain subjects had a significant impact on the outcome of a study, an effect he called “experimenter bias.” .

He was sometimes critical of the ways in which his research could be simplified and distorted, especially by reformers in fields such as education and medicine. There wasn't a single toolbox of gestures, he said, that a teacher or doctor could use to improve outcomes.

“It is too simplistic to say that a doctor, for example, gives a signal when he nods or tilts forward,” he told The Times. “If you freeze the moment and take out part of what's going on, you lose the richness of the phenomenon.”

Robert Rosenthal was born on March 2, 1933 in Giessen, Germany, the son of Hermine (Kahn) and Julius Rosenthal, who sold clothing.

As the Nazis tightened their grip on Germany, the Rosenthals fled. They lived for a while in the British colony of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, before arriving in the United States.

They settled in Queens, but in Robert's senior year they moved to Los Angeles, where his father opened a department store. Robert studied psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1953 and his doctorate just three years later.

Dr. Rosenthal's training and early career were in clinical psychology, with a particular interest in schizophrenia. But without meaning to, his work began to take on a social angle.

While teaching at the University of North Dakota in the late 1950s, he conducted an experiment in which a group of students were given two sets of rats. He told the students that one group was trained to be adept at running a maze, the other was not, even though they were both trained identically. He then had the students lead the rats through mazes.

As he expected, the 'maze-bright' rats did significantly better. In a 1963 paper, he concluded that the students had subconsciously favored the “maze-bright” rats in the way they interacted with them, giving them an advantage.

He married MaryLu Clayton in 1951. She died in 2010. Along with their daughter Mrs. Mahasin, he is survived by another daughter, Roberta Rosenthal Hawkins; a son, David Clayton Rosenthal; and six grandchildren.

In 1963, Harvard hired Dr. Rosenthal stepped in on a short-term, non-tenured basis to help replace Timothy Leary, a clinical psychologist who had been fired for his experiments with LSD and other drugs.

A year later he was offered a permanent position in another field, social psychology, beating out the promising social psychologist Stanley Milgram. Dr. Rosenthal suspected that this was because Dr. Milgram quickly rose to fame for a series of now-famous experiments that showed how easy it was to deliver electric shocks from one person to another, and Harvard was wary of promoting him.

In addition to his work on researcher bias and interpersonal expectations, Dr. Rosenthal was a pioneer in the field of meta-analysis, in which he developed a framework for combining multiple studies of the same phenomenon to achieve better results.

Dr. Rosenthal retired from Harvard in 1999 and then moved to the University of California, Riverside, where he taught until 2018.

He left that job when his usually excellent student evaluations began to fall to just above average, he wrote in “Pillars of Social Psychology,” a 2022 book edited by Saul Kassin.

“Listening to the data,” he continued, “I went to the department chair that week and announced that I was retiring.”