Pygmalion Effect

People’s beliefs about us influence how we behave. This is known as the Pygmalion Effect, after George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1916). In it, Professor Higgins transforms a Cockney flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, into someone who passes for a duchess. As Shaw has Higgins express it, “The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in … Read more…

Requirements for “Bridging Social Capital”

Cultural Diversity Graphic

Last Wednesday in “Dealing with Difference” I describe “bonding social capital” and “bridging social capital.” I enumerate the serious consequences of too much of the former and make a case for more of the latter. Bridging social capital means developing social networks, norms of reciprocity, mutual assistance, and trustworthiness with people who differ from us. Bridging social capital is harder to build than bonding social capital because this tends to evolve naturally among people with common … Read more…