Psychological Effects in the Classroom

You are human, I am human, your team lead is human, and so are your students. We are all vulnerable to the effects of psychological effects, cognitive biases, and logical fallacies. As teachers, we are more prone to the first two. The best way to ensure we stay as bias-free and cognitively clear as we can is to be aware of the most relevant psychological effects and cognitive biases for our profession.

The Pygmalion Effect

If you, as a teacher, have high expectations of one of your students, then that student will rise to those expectations and perform better. It is a type of self-fulfilling prophecy. (Eden, 1992, p.1) It is well documented that there are expectancy effects in research. (Friedrich et al., 2015, p.1) According to Friedrich, previous research focused on individual students, “...rather than at the classroom level (do classes improve when teachers have generally high expectations of their students?)” (2015, p.1). Friedrich studied the teachers’ average expectancies of their students and students’ later achievement and found that there was no significant association. (p.8) They did find that there was an association between teacher expectancy and student self-concept, however. (p.7)

Your expectations for each student matter because they affect how the student views themselves, which has an influence on their performance. (Huang, 2011) If you have low expectations for a student, you will assign them work to meet those expectations, which sets in stone their capabilities. If you scaffold properly up to a higher level of expectations, think back to when you learned about the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), then they will step up and achieve it. If they achieve it, it affects their self-concept, which leads to greater achievement.

Diffusion of Responsibility & the Ringelmann Effect

Have you ever been in a group where no one acts? Where no one feels responsible for the group’s work as a whole? Welcome to diffusion of responsibility and the Ringelmann effect. You may have heard of the bystander effect, which is a type of diffusion of responsibility. The diffusion of responsibility is the relationship between the size of a group and each individual's personal responsibility, and they are inversely related; as the group’s size increases, their personal responsibility decreases. Another negative side effect of larger groups is the Ringelmann effect. It states that group size and productivity are inversely related; as the group’s size increases, their productivity decreases.

I know you’ve been in a classroom discussion with a dozen or more students, and no one is raising their hand, even though you know that several students know the answer. One solution to this is to put them into small groups, but what is the ideal group size? The ideal group size is three. (Laughlin et al., 2006)

Laughlin found that groups of three, four, and five outperformed individuals and groups of two. “These results suggest that 3-person groups are necessary and sufficient to perform better than the best individuals on highly intellective problems.” (2006)

You’re going to need to experiment with different groups in your class to avoid these two effects. There are several ways to group students, and I encourage you to look into them and find the one that best fits your classroom. They are, but not limited to, random grouping, like-ability grouping, and cross-ability grouping. There are even some that are outside your class, like cross-class grouping and cross-grade grouping.

The Crespi Effect

You probably have a reward mechanism in place in your class, right? You give rewards to students for completed work, or maybe they were extra kind, so you reward them. Perhaps, they participated a lot on a single day, so you reward them. Well, you need to know about the Crespi Effect.

The Crespi Effect states that the level of performance of a subsequent action is proportional to the reward that was given for the preceding action. (APA Dictionary of Psychology, n.d.) For example, let’s say you reward all students one star for completing their homework. Many students perform very well, but there is this one student, Sam, who consistently gets somewhere around 75%. You could take advantage of the Crespi Effect here to increase the star reward to increase motivation and performance. Simply tell Sam that you’ll give them two stars if they get a 90% or higher on their homework from now on. This takes advantage of the Crespi Effect.

The Crespi Effect works the other way, however. Alex is a straight-A student and always does their homework and always gets an A on it. However, you’re running out of stars (for whatever reason), so you decide that you do not need to give Alex stars anymore for completing their homework because they always get an A. What harm could it do? This could result in decreased performance on their homework because the extrinsic motivation was just removed, even though you thought Alex did not need the extrinsic motivation.

Consistency is key with rewards. Never change them without thoughtful consideration of the consequences based on the individual student, but also the class as a whole. Imagine a scenario where one student is rewarded more than the others for completing their homework. I’m sure you can think of many ways in which this could go wrong.

The Pratfall Effect

The Pratfall Effect states that a person who is likable or of high social appeal will become more likable after making a mistake. The converse is true as well, where a person who is not as likable, or who is average, will become less likable after making a mistake. (Aronson et al., 1966)

Imagine two students, Sam and Alex (hello again!). As we know, Alex is the high-performing student, whereas Sam is not. Let’s say they both make the same mistake: they forgot to do their homework. Now, consider the two below responses.

• “Oh it’s okay, don’t worry about it!”
• “This is not acceptable. You must complete it and hand it in tomorrow.”
• “Why do you think you forgot to do your homework?”

Which response do you think you are most likely to use for Alex? Which one for Sam? If you did not answer C for both students, then you have fallen under the effects of the Pratfall Effect. But, that’s not all! Asking why is the first step to ensuring the Pratfall Effect does not affect you, but you must always remain vigilant of how you tackle issues like this in the classroom and ensure that each student is treated in the same manner, no matter their academic or social standing. You must be aware of this effect so that you can treat every child with equality, even those who are average and below. Do not let the Pratfall Effect lead to a ‘death spiral’ caused by the Pygmalion Effect for any of your students.

I am sad to say that I have observed that very same death spiral in other teacher’s classrooms, and they are directly related to the Pratfall Effect. Their below-average students do not rise to the occasion because they are treated much more harshly when they make mistakes than the students who are performing well.

Every time a student makes a mistake, whether it is academic or social, in your classroom, examine critically how you responded and ensure that you did not feel the effects of the Pratfall Effect.

Other Psychological Effects

There are myriad other psychological effects that this article did not dive into that are directly related to teaching, and even more not related. I recommend you learn about all of the effects in Appendix A in order to be the most effective teacher you can be. If you prefer the video format, I recommend The Paint Explainer’s videos titled Every Psychological Effect Explained in 12 Minutes (2024) and Every Bias Explained in 8 Minutes (2023). Keep in mind, however, that these videos explain each effect/bias very quickly without going into extensive detail, and that The Paint Explainer covers every effect and bias, even those not directly related to teaching. Given that the first post was about using LLMs effectively, I had ChatGPT-4 write the below. Do not worry, I checked everything it wrote to make sure it was correct; one must always be vigilant of hallucinating LLMs!

Conclusion

As a teacher, you have great power, and no one said it better than Uncle Ben, “With great power there must also come great responsibility.” (Lee et al., 2002) You have a responsibility to understand psychological effects so that you can avoid falling under their effects to ensure that you treat each student with the equality and equity that they deserve.

References

Appendix

Appendix A

Other psychological effects

• Pygmalion Effect: The phenomenon where higher expectations lead to an increase in performance.
• Diffusion of Responsibility: A social psychology phenomenon where individuals are less likely to take action or feel a sense of responsibility when others are present.
• Ringelmann Effect: The tendency for individual productivity to decrease as the size of the group increases.
• Cocktail Party Effect: The ability to focus one's auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, as when a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room.
• Contrast Effect: The enhancement or diminishment, relative to normal, of perception, cognition, or related performance as a result of successive (or simultaneous) exposure to a stimulus of lesser or greater value in the same dimension.
• Crespi Effect: The phenomenon where individuals exhibit greater changes in behavior or attitudes in response to large changes in rewards or stimuli.
• Curse of Knowledge: The cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, knowing something, finds it hard to imagine what it is like for someone else not to know it.
• Cryptomnesia: The occurrence of forgotten memories returning without it being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original.
• Generation Effect: The phenomenon where information is better remembered if it is generated from one's own mind rather than simply read.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: A belief or expectation that an individual holds about a future event that manifests because the individual holds it.
• Golem Effect: The phenomenon where lower expectations placed upon individuals either by supervisors or the individual themselves lead to poorer performance.
• Hawthorne Effect: The alteration of behavior by the subjects of a study due to their awareness of being observed.
• Irrelevant Speech Effect: The decreased ability to recall information in the presence of background speech.
• Kuleshov Effect: The phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation.
• Levels of Processing: The theory that deeper levels of analysis produce more enduring memory.
• Matthew Effect: The phenomenon where "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" in terms of recognition and resources.
• Naive Realism: The belief that we see reality as it really is – objectively and without bias; that the facts are plain for all to see; that rational people will agree with us; and that those who don't are either uninformed, lazy, or biased.
• Observer Expectancy Effect: A form of reactivity in which a researcher's cognitive bias causes them to subconsciously influence the participants of an experiment.
• Outgroup Homogeneity Effect: The perception that members of an outgroup are more similar to each other than members of the ingroup are to themselves.
• Overjustification Effect: The phenomenon in which being rewarded for doing something actually diminishes intrinsic motivation to perform that action.
• Pratfall Effect: The tendency for attractiveness to increase or decrease after an individual makes a mistake, depending on the individual's perceived competence.
• Certainty Effect: The psychological effect where people give greater weight to outcomes that are certain, compared to outcomes that are only probable.
• Self-Reference Effect: The tendency for individuals to best remember information that is personally relevant.
• Spacing Effect: The phenomenon whereby learning is greater when studying is spread out over time, as opposed to studying the same amount of content in a single session.
• Isolation Effect (Von Restorff Effect): The tendency to remember an item that stands out like a sore thumb more easily than other items.
• Word Frequency Effect: The phenomenon that the cognitive processing of a word is faster for high-frequency words than for low-frequency words.
• Zeigarnik Effect: The tendency to remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.
• Self-Serving Bias: The common habit of a person taking credit for positive events or outcomes, but blaming outside factors for negative events.
• Framing Effect: The way in which words, concepts, or decisions are presented can significantly affect choices and judgments.
• Actor-Observer Bias: The tendency to attribute one's own actions to external causes while attributing other people's behaviors to internal causes.
• Picture Superiority Effect: The phenomenon in which pictures and images are more likely to be remembered than words.
• Outcome Bias: The tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
• Mere-Exposure Effect: The phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them.
• Hard-Easy Effect: The tendency for people to overestimate their ability to perform easy tasks and underestimate their ability to perform difficult tasks.
• Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon (Frequency Illusion): The phenomenon in which something that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly thereafter.
• Halo Effect: The tendency for an impression created in one area to influence opinion in another area.
• Anchoring Bias: The common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the "anchor") when making decisions.
• First Impressions: The event when one person first encounters another person and forms a mental image of that person.
• Overconfidence Effect: The phenomenon where someone's subjective confidence in their judgments is reliably greater than their objective accuracy, especially when confidence is relatively high.
• Serial Position Effect: The tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series best, and the middle items worst.
• Recency Bias: The tendency to weigh recent events more than earlier events.
• Authority Bias: The tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure (unrelated to its content) and be more influenced by that opinion.
• Availability Cascade: A self-reinforcing cycle that explains the development of certain kinds of collective beliefs; a belief gains more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or "availability").
• Next-in-Line Effect: The phenomenon where people in a group have difficulty remembering what was said by the person immediately before them because they are too focused on what they themselves will say next.
• Spotlight Effect: The phenomenon in which people tend to believe they are being noticed more than they really are.
• Peak-End Rule: The psychological heuristic in which people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e., its most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.