EXPECTATIONS HAVE POWER
Adapted from Scientific American, August
2013
An
EXPECTATION is a future-based belief that may or may not be realistic.
Question
is, do expectations factor into our outcomes? Are our results determined by our
expectations?
This
is something that a German psychologist, named Ulrich Weger, and an Australian
psychologist, named Stephen Loughnan, wondered about, so they did an experiment
with two groups of people that were asked a series of questions on a video screen.
One
group was told they would be given subliminal flashes of the answers that their
unconscious minds would understand right before they were asked the question. The
other group was told the flashes were just an indicator that the next question
was about to appear.
Nothing
meaningful was in the flash for either group, nothing at all. And yet, those
that expected that they were being exposed to the answers did much better on
the test. Apparently expecting to know the answers made
people more likely to get the answers right.
Here’s
some more on this topic.
Most
of us think that our bodies respond to physical exercise in a mechanical way. This
is true. So we count our calorie intake, the calories we lose on a treadmill,
etc. However, merely changing our thoughts about our physical activity seems capable
of changing our bodies as this next experiment demonstrates.
The
background: Hotel room attendants clean on average 15 rooms per day, each room
taking between 20 and 30 minutes to complete. (The physical activity involved
meets the Surgeon General’s recommendation of at least 30 minutes of physical
exercise per day for a healthy lifestyle.) However, most hotel room attendants
believe that they do NOT get regular exercise; and a lot of them believe that
they do not get any exercise at all.
The
experiment: Alia Crum and Ellen Langer, of the psychology department at Harvard
University, told a group of hotel room attendants that their work INDEED provided
the recommended exercise for a healthy lifestyle. The treatment group was
monitored for 4 weeks.
A
control group of hotel room attendants, who were NOT told that their work
provided the recommended exercise, was similarly monitored.
People
in the treatment group lost weight; their body fat percentages, waist-to-hip
ratios, and systolic blood pressures dropped. Amazing, how did that happen? People
in the control group showed no such improvement. These changes occurred despite
the fact that the hotel room attendants’ amount of work, amount of exercise
outside of work, and diets stayed the same for both the treatment and the
control group.
This
all goes to show that WE OFTEN GET WHAT WE EXPECT. So why not expect the best. If
mindsets can change us, maybe we can deliberately choose our mindsets to
improve our abilities. Yes! Perhaps we ought to choose to adopt a mindset that
improves creativity, or productivity or happiness. Yes, yes, yes!
Of
course, expectations can be applied to many things and it’s amazing how many
barriers we can break through just because we expect to do so!
Expect
the best and make it so.