Golem Effect

Low expectations can help produce the weaker performance they anticipate, because expectations alter how people are treated and what opportunities they receive.

3 min read

What Is It?

Researchers studying expectation effects in the 1980s named this the Golem effect, after the folklore figure animated from clay, as the negative-expectation counterpart to the better-known Pygmalion effect. The two are related forms of expectancy effects: expectations can shape treatment, and treatment can then influence performance in ways that partly confirm the original expectation, though the two aren’t necessarily equal in magnitude or identical in mechanism across every setting. Low expectations can alter how much opportunity, coaching, attention, autonomy, patience, or challenge a person receives, and those differences can suppress subsequent performance. The person being underestimated typically isn’t aware their manager’s low expectations are shaping their treatment, and the manager typically isn’t aware their treatment is shaping the outcome, which makes the pattern self-confirming from the inside: the underestimated person performs worse, and that worse performance seems to justify the low expectation that helped produce it.

Why Does It Matter?

A manager who’s privately written off a team member as a weak performer changes their behavior toward that person in ways that are easy to miss from the inside, terser feedback, fewer stretch assignments, faster escalation of small mistakes, less benefit of the doubt, and each of those changes independently makes it harder for the person to actually perform well. The manager isn’t being cruel, from their perspective they’re simply adjusting realistically to someone’s demonstrated ability level. But some of that demonstrated ability level was produced by the adjustment itself, not just observed by it, which means the manager’s original assessment can end up partly self-fulfilled rather than purely diagnostic.

This creates a specific organizational risk around reputations that outlive their accuracy. Someone labeled as a low performer early in a role, for reasons that may have had nothing to do with underlying ability, a bad first assignment, an unclear onboarding, a personality clash, can get locked into a Golem-effect spiral that makes the original label progressively harder to disconfirm, since the label itself is actively producing some of the evidence used to confirm it. The deeper mechanism is that classification changes opportunity, fewer stretch assignments, less sponsorship, less access to visible work, more conservative staffing decisions, and changed opportunity then changes the evidence later used to validate the original classification.

What Changes Once You See It?

You start treating a persistently underperforming team member as a case to investigate rather than a settled fact, specifically checking whether your own reduced investment in them might be part of what’s producing the pattern.

You become more careful not to let an early performance judgment quietly reduce the coaching, developmental opportunity, and chances to recover that would actually allow the judgment to be disproven, since that drift is exactly the mechanism the effect runs on.

You also get more suspicious of your own quick, confident judgments about someone’s ceiling, particularly early in a working relationship, since that judgment can start shaping your behavior toward them before you’ve actually gathered enough evidence to justify it.

Common Misunderstandings

  • It isn’t a claim that all performance differences between employees are caused by manager expectations. Real differences in skill, effort, and fit exist independent of this effect, the concern is specifically the portion of the gap that expectations themselves create or widen.
  • It isn’t the same as the Pygmalion Effect, though it runs on the identical mechanism in the opposite direction. The two are worth holding together precisely because they show the mechanism is symmetric, expectations shape treatment, and treatment shapes outcomes, in both directions.
  • It doesn’t mean managers should ignore evidence about real performance differences. The risk is allowing an assessment to alter opportunity and support so strongly that the assessment becomes harder to test honestly, not that every assessment should be inflated.
  • It isn’t limited to formal manager-employee relationships. It can show up between peers, between a mentor and mentee, or between a founder and an underestimated hire, anywhere one person’s expectation of another shapes how they’re treated.

Diagnostic Question

Are we giving this person a real chance to disconfirm our expectations, or has our treatment of them made the original judgment increasingly difficult to escape?

Explore Further

Field Notes

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Related Field Guide

Origin

Identified in expectation research following Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson’s original Pygmalion effect studies (1968); the term “Golem effect” for the negative-expectation counterpart was established in organizational and educational psychology research through the 1980s, notably by Dov Eden’s work on managerial expectations.

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