Computer science and the Pygmalion effect

Abstract

Can computer science learn from the social sciences? We focus our discussions on an undesired phenomenon that commonly affects software developers. Known as the Pygmalion effect, this phenomenon has been studied intensely by social scientists but almost entirely ignored by computer scientists. Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with his statue, Galatea, brought to life for him by Aphrodite. In the 1960s, R. Rosenthal and L. Jacobson, two American psychologists, used this myth to name an observation of theirs: whenever someone evaluates something, the evaluator's expectations concerning the evaluated object influence the evaluation, in a way that tends to prove the evaluator's initial hypothesis. Intensive studies since then have confirmed this initial observation: virtually every evaluation process in which humans intervene is prone to the Pygmalion effect, and computer science is no exception: the expectations of computer systems evaluators can strongly bias the outcome of the evaluation