Individuals manipulate each other and cultures perpetuate themselves using some of the same very subtle social tools. One method is through expectations. What people expect of each other is often so well hidden in the individual's personal or cultural sense of self-interest that both parties remain blissfully unaware of their own attitudes - until such time as an expectation is not met. And even then, the psychological dance that follows - and which touches on virtually every sphere of an individual's life - often takes place entirely at a subconscious level.
It has long been known that one person's expectations with regard to another's behaviour come to act as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. The most quoted example of this Pygmalion effect is, perhaps, where teachers are given the impression at the beginning of a term that some students are high achievers, when in fact they were chosen at random. In this case, staff tend to perceive these children as more intellectually aware and autonomous.
As one would imagine, Pygmalion-effect children also win the affection of their teachers, who seem to teach with more warmth the students about whom they have been fooled into having more favourable expectations. Yet, counter-intuitively, and for reasons psychologists are still trying to figure out, high-performing control-group children (who are not specifically expected to do well, yet do so) do not receive the same warmth and attention. This leads to the bewildering and worrying conclusion that while expected achievements are rewarded in children, unexpected intellectual performance is met with actual discouragement - albeit unwittingly.
At the level of cultures, adults differ in what they anticipate (and therefore foster) in children. For example, in one classic study that compared mothers of five-year-olds, Japanese women expected children to master skills related to preparation for adulthood relatively early. The expectations of Americans, on the other hand, showed greater emphasis on peer-group adaptation.
The power of expectation has also been observed in the unintentional influence judges wield on jurors, how business people affect their employees and how health-care workers unintentionally manipulate their patients - not to mention how psychologists unconsciously create self-fulfilling prophesy effects with respect to their research participants.
Of course, psychologists, of all people, should know all about expectancy effects. And they do. That is one of the many reasons they work with animals instead of people. But, as strange as it may sound, even the humble laboratory rat is not immune to the expectations of the researcher. They, too, appear to abide by the hypothetical expectations of their masters - and tactfully produce the very results expected.
As Bertrand Russell pointed out as far back as 1927: 'Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible display of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance. Animals observed by Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve the solution out of their inner consciousness.'