“YOU’RE GONNA EAT LIGHTNING AND YOU’RE GONNA CRAP THUNDER!”

In a week when over a million students have received their GCSE results, we look at the role the expectations of others may play in fashioning our futures…

On the 23^rd August, 1754, a boy was born in the palace of Versailles. Within 20 years, his older brother, father and grandfather had all passed away, leaving Louis XVI on the throne of France. 18 years later, on the Place de la Revolution, he was beheaded by the guillotine, a device which, according to the French executioner, Charles Henri Sanson, Louis had actually helped to design, ‘suggesting the use of a straight, angled blade instead of a curved one.’

Maybe that was some small consolation as Louis stared down into the basket beneath him. As the  second (surviving) son of Louis XV, he had not been expected to ascend to the throne. Then later, as king, he probably hadn’t anticipated such a grisly end, in spite of the striking parallels with his cousin several times (and 110 years) removed, Charles I of England. In particular, both cousins failed to live up to the expectations of their subjects as monarchs (victory in battle, decisive leadership, full larders) yet insisted on clinging to what they had come to expect as their royal prerogatives (foreign wars, extravagance and unpopular wives) which inevitably led to direct (and deadly) conflict with their national assemblies (the French Estates General and the English Parliament) and fueled both nations’ expectations of political reform.

But what effect do the expectations of others have on us who do not have great power (and great responsibility) thrust up on us, on 23^rd August, 2025?

A GP’s casual, ill-considered words or behaviour may have a pronounced negative nocebo (‘I shall harm’) effect on our recovery as patients.*

And a report published this week** looks at how a teacher’s initial (and intuitive) expectations of a pupil’s performance can significantly influence a pupil’s success.

In The Business of Pleasure, as in the less fun commercial pursuits also available, the positive impact of management expectations on employee performance is often referred to as The Pygmalion Effect, after a foundational 1968 study of schoolchildren*** (not the play by George Bernard Shaw)

This exercise in self-fulfilling prophecy works as follows:

·       A manager holds high expectations – believes the employee will overperform;

·       The manager behaves accordingly – gives more support, more opportunities, more praise and/or constructive feedback, more eye contact, etc;

·       The employee senses this – generating increased self-esteem and motivation;

·       The employee’s performance improves – confirming the manager’s original belief.

Similarly, The Pygmalion Effect’s evil twin, aka The Golem Effect**** (not ‘Gollum,’ the slithery thing in The Lord of the Rings) describes how low expectations from managers, teachers, etc. can lead to poor performance:

·       A manager holds low expectations – believes the employee will underperform;

·       The manager behaves accordingly – gives less support, fewer opportunities, less praise and/or constructive feedback, less eye contact, etc;

·       The employee senses this – leading to reduced self-esteem and motivation;

·       The employee’s performance deteriorates – confirming the manager’s original belief.

And here’s the really unfair thing...

In Rosenthal and Jacobsen’s original 1968 study (ABOVE) teachers weren’t instructed to treat the students they expected to perform well any differently from how they treated the rest of the group. In fact, they weren’t even fully conscious that they were discriminating in this way.  The same sub/semi-conscious behaviours were observed in a later management study**** where ‘leaders with higher expectations tended to communicate more positively and delegate more challenging tasks, even if they believe they’re treating everyone equally.’ 

Within twelve months of Louis XVI ending France’s 150 year experiment with Absolute Monarchy, and a thousand plus years of monarchy per se (since 481 when Clovis I was crowned King of the Franks) a 24-year-old artillery captain received the following review of his performance at the Siege of Toulon:

“I have no words to describe his merit: much technical skill, an equal degree of intelligence, and too much gallantry.”

This was by no means the last entry in Napoleon Bonaparte’s scrapbook. A Corsican of ever-so-humble origins, his contemporaries at the French military academies all looked down their polished pince-nez at this prodigious parvenue who would go on to establish one of the largest European empires in history.  So what was the canny Corsican’s ingrédient secrète?

Unlike the Pygmalion and Golem Effect, which are solely driven by third-party expectations, The Galatea Effect (the name of the Pygmalion's animated statue not Italian ice-cream) states that if you, like Napoleon, have high expectations of yourself, then your performance will improve -and the rest can go to Hell/va en enfer! It is based on Albert Bandura’s ‘Self-Efficacy’ theory which lists four basic contributors to self belief:

a)     Mastery experience – succeeding in tasks builds one's self belief;

b)    Vicarious experiences -seeing others succeed makes you believe you can;

c)     Verbal persuasion -encouragement and positive feedback;

d)    Physiological/emotional states – calmness and reduced anxiety.

The Galatea effect worked well for Bonaparte for almost twenty years…

1)     As a young officer during the French revolution he took bold initiatives, like at Toulon, and his confidence convinced superiors to trust him with increasingly larger commands;

2)     After being side-lined politically in the mid 1790s he continued to believe he was ‘meant for greatness’ and this self-expectation drove him to seize opportunities in Italy (1796-97) and later in Egypt;

3)     His self-belief inspired his troops and his ‘I am destined to win’ attitude often translated into better performance from his armies (a ‘ripple effect’ from Galatea to Pygmalion;

4)     Even in desperate situations (e.g. the retreat from Russia in 1812 and exile in Elba, 1814) he retained an almost unshakeable conviction that he would return to power, and in 1815, during the Hundred Days War, his belief in himself rallied thousands of soldiers back to his side without a shot being fired.

And then it didn’t

…when Napoleon’s unshakeable belief in his own abilities lead to historically momentous (and musically much-celebrated) examples of overreach (Russia, 1812 and Waterloo, 1815).

For us in The Business of Pleasure, audience expectations are both our guardrails and our jumping-off points. Whether it is fiction, cinema or musical theatre, music, drama or dance, as creators we (almost) always need to learn the conventions of our chosen media (before we can learn to vault over them) and the pulse and rhythms of tension and relief; the build-ups, the pay-offs, the swooping character arcs and dramatic arcs …and then, just when they think it’s all over, the false ending suddenly springs the Surprise Bonus, the Cherry-on-the-Cake or Big Reveal. And the universal gasp of delight sounds out from Stalls to Balcony.  And while we might like to think of ourselves as Absolute Monarchs, reigning over the domains we have created, if we don’t pay careful attention to the changing expectations of our audiences, we will inevitably face an even worse fate than Louis XVI and cousin Charles … empty seats and unturned pages!

DT 23 August 2025

*Peterson et al, 2014

 **Correlations and comparisons of teacher expectations, achievement motivation, academic study and creativity Jun Hu, Shan Qian Frontiers in Psychology 21 Aug, 2025

 ***Pygmalion in the Classroom, Rosenthal & Jacobsen, 1968; Interestingly further studies were not able to replicate Rosenthal & Jacobsen’s published results and one paper (Rauderbush, 1984) found the Pygmalion effect to be much stronger ‘when expectancy is induced at the beginning of the school year. When teachers have gotten to know their students for more than two weeks prior to expectancy induction, the impact of expectancy induction is virtually zero.’

 ****Elisha Babad 1977; Babad, Inbar and Rosenthal 1982

 *****Eden 1984