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Thomas Edison. One of the world’s most recognized and renowned inventors. Also, supposedly, addled as a child. While tales of the incident have been exaggerated, as Snopes reports, as a boy, Edison had overheard a teacher describe him as addled and not worth keeping in school. Upon hearing of the incident, his mother (and apparently his greatest champion) angrily told off the teacher, telling him that her son had more brains than he did. Young Edison’s response was a resolved determination to “be worthy of her and show her that her confidence was not misplaced.”

That’s the power of positive expectations.

Dream Big

Now, I don’t want to promote what my former pastor calls Disney theology: the idea that if you can dream it, you can do it. As nice as that sounds, we live in a world that has constraints. We inhabit bodies that have constraints. I can dream all I want about flying, but outside of mechanical assistance (e.g., airplane), it’s never going to happen; I’m not a bird. And as I watch the PyeongChang Olympics, I’m fully aware that, no matter how much I might want it or dream about it or how hard I train, I’ve missed my opportunity to be an Olympian; there are too many years of dedicated training required to get to that point, and I haven’t been doing that.

But that doesn’t mean that I can’t still make notable achievements in physical—or other—domains. No, I may never reach worldwide, Olympics-level recognition as an athlete or singer, but I can still achieve greatness. And a lot of that comes down to the fact that I know what I’m capable of. And I believe that I can do it. (Relatedly, I’m currently in the midst of what I’m calling “Thirty in Thirty by Thirty”, a list of thirty things I want to finish or accomplish or habits I want to build in the thirty days leading up to my thirtieth birthday. It’s an ambitious list, and it might prove that it’s too many things to accomplish in the limited time. But I know that the things on the list are within my ability to accomplish. That’s why I’m doing it. So I’m going to keep believing that I can. [Follow-up: Confession: I didn’t make them all happen. If you allow loopholes, I succeeded, but without those loopholes…not so much. But, hey, I dreamed big and gave it a decent effort.]) It comes down to expectations, to belief.

Believing is not synonymous with dreaming (and neither is hoping with wishing, but that’s a matter for another day). In ancient Greek, the word for our English “belief” (or “faith”), pisteuó, is derived from the word peithó, which translates as “to persuade” (or, in the passive, “to be persuaded”), “to urge”, or “to have confidence”. In other words, belief is not blind; rather, faith is based in fact. So it’s not that our belief makes things possible, but that we believe because we know that those things are already possible. And out of that belief, that expectation of what is possible, we become empowered to go and make it happen.

Image credit: Joshua Earle (freely available via Unsplash)

Believe to Achieve

There is a plethora of academic literature showing these expectation effects in the classroom. (I’ve included a few relevant links at the bottom of this post for the interested readers.) Across ages (from elementary school through college), across ethnicities, and across academic domains (reading, math, science), the findings are consistent: expectations, whether they come from teachers, parents, or the students themselves, seem to predict achievement outcomes. For better or worse, mind you. We tend to rise—or fall—to the expectations that are put on us. So high expectations are associated with higher performance, and vice versa. Basically, it’s the academic counterpart of the placebo and nocebo effects. Both sets of effects show us the power of our thoughts.

So that’s good news, in terms of trying to achieve greatness through great expectations. If you have the thoughts, you just might get the results. But even if you don’t have the thoughts, you still might get the results if others have those thoughts of you. And if you hear often enough that others believe in you, you’ll likely start believing in yourself. Because thoughts can be retrained. That’s the whole premise of cognitive behavioral therapy. It’s also the reason why a positive attitude (which I discussed in an earlier post) can be such a game changer in so many areas of life—mental/emotional, social, even physical.

But what about those times when the doubts and darkness seem insurmountable? When you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel? When, no matter what positive things others have to say, you just can’t will yourself to believe them? Is there something else we can do to start changing those thoughts, to start heightening those expectations?

The Bidirectionality of the Thought-Action Connection

In one study that perhaps sheds some light on the nature of the mechanisms underlying these academic expectation effects, Englund et al. (2004) found that parents’ expectations were associated with higher involvement from parents, which in turn was associated with higher academic achievement of their children. While these still allow for explanations of changes in thought patterns and/or those thoughts’ having direct effects on the brain (as is the case, at least sometimes, with the placebo effect), they also show that these expectations lead to key behaviors, which then help to fulfill those expectations. Consistent with what we seem to intuitively believe to be the standard case, these findings suggest that cognitions (which, for purposes of this post, include both thoughts and emotions) affect our actions. Perhaps what is going on here is that the parent’s behaviors are changing the children’s thoughts. If so, that suggests that, rather counterintuitively to what we might think is the norm, our thoughts can be affected by actions, that the inner workings of our minds are influenced by the outer workings of the world around us. Numerous studies in the field of psychology show this to be true.

The phenomenon of cognitive dissonance (which I discussed in my previous post) is one such example of how actions influence behavior. But that is not the only example. In another one of my favorite studies, Strack and colleagues (1988) (yes, I discussed this study in an earlier post, but to interesting to not share again) found that subjects rated cartoons as funnier when holding a pen with their teeth than when holding a pen with their lips. As the argument goes, when holding the pen with the teeth, many of the muscles used to smile are activated (see left image below); when holding the pen in the lips, many of the muscles used to frown are activated (see right image below). These muscle activations then presumably feedback to the brain, conveying information about current emotional states, and seemingly producing a corresponding change in the emotional state: when you’re “smiling”, it must be because you’re in a good mood, so that’ll put you in a good mood, so you’ll find the cartoons funnier. In other words, actions affect cognitions.

Image credit: me

So that’s even more good news. That means there may be a way out of those dark tunnels. In those moments when you can’t will yourself to change your beliefs, start acting in accordance with the beliefs you want to have, and eventually your attitude will (ideally) catch up. It’s not so much that you’re trying to put the cart before the proverbial horse; rather, it’s more along the lines of the famous quote from “Field of Dreams”: “If you build it, they will come.” Except in this case, it’s more like, “If you achieve it, you will believe it.” Sometimes you have to start from where you want to be and make yourself get there. When you’re stuck in the doldrums with no wind in your sails, maybe it’s time to start blowing into the sails yourself. Whether that’s changing your attitude, enabling that upward spiral in positive thoughts, or whether it’s changing your actions to modify your thoughts, you can start generating the great expectations you want to have. And then as you start to really believe (i.e., pisteuó, “to have confidence”), you just might find yourself empowered to achieve.

Yours truly,
D. R. Meriwether, Ph.D.
Renaissance Man and Abundant Life Liver

Further Reading

Teacher Expectations

• Teacher’s estimates of children’s IQ as preschoolers predicted high school GPA, especially for students with low estimated IQ (which was associated with further associated with lower socioeconomic standing and perceived immaturity).
• Beyond what can be accounted for by motivation or previous achievement, teachers’ expectations predicted changes in students’ academic achievement.
• Teacher’s expectations account for at least part of the ethnic achievement gap.

Parent Expectations

• Parents’ expectations are associated with children’s academic achievement, particularly when achievement is measured globally (as opposed to by specific subjects).
• Parents’ expectations affect their involvement, which in turn affects their children’s academic achievements.
• Parents’ expectations of their children’s performance predicted actual performance in both mathematics and language subjects.

Student Expectations

• Students’ perceived ability to succeed in various science and engineering majors was associated with higher grades and longer persistence in related majors.
• University first-years’ measures of self-efficacy predicted academic performance both directly and indirectly through academic expectations.