In other words, teachers' expectations had improved the academic performance of their students. Where they expected success, they found it.

Negative expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

The best way to keep from receiving the worst from people is to make a conscious effort to expect the best--and to show it in as many ways as possible.

During the 1964-1965 school year, Harvard's Robert Rosenthal conducted an experiment in an elementary school to see whether teacher expectations influenced their students' performances. Teachers were told the names of children in their classes who were "late bloomers," about to dramatically spurt in their academic learning.

In fact, these "special" children were randomly selected and no smarter than their classmates. At the end of the term, all the students were tested, and the results made an important point. The "special" children not only performed better in the eyes of their teachers (an expected outcome, the so-called "halo effect"), but they also scored significantly higher on standardized IQ tests.

In other words, teachers' expectations had improved the academic performance of their students. Where they expected success, they found it. Later, Rosenthal conducted additional experiments, among them a study with laboratory mice where rodents labeled as "maze-bright" (bred to successfully navigate mazes but, in reality, no different than normal mice) actually performed better in maze tests. On further study, Rosenthal's team found that the laboratory researchers handled the "maze-bright" mice more often and more gently than the others.

Rosenthal's "expectation effect" has important implications for all of us. Following are two of them.

All of us tend to make premature and often superficial judgments about people. Race, gender, economic status, and political affiliation are just some of the areas where we negatively label others. And, all too often, our expectations come true. The people turn out to be just as unfriendly, self-centered, ignorant, or dishonest as we imagined them to be.

Rosenthal's theory suggests that we might be partly to blame. Negative expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies. It can happen with our own children. Wanting to protect them from failure, we focus exclusively on their failures, communicating expectations of failure to them. What would happen if instead we started expecting them to be (and treating them as though they were) "late bloomers," successes-in-the-making?

Rosenthal's theory teaches that the best way to keep from receiving the worst from people is to make a conscious effort to expect the best--and to show it in as many ways as possible.

For the last three years I have taught freshman writing students on the college campus. One of my primary goals each semester is to get kids to believe in their own ideas and their own ability to, with training and hard work, express those ideas in clear, persuasive prose.

And the best way to do this is something that actually comes quite easily for me. As often and persuasively as I can, I tell them about their successes. I let them know how much I enjoy reading their essays and how much I look forward to the next ones.

This is easy for me because I really do believe in and enjoy their work. And it's easy for me because, as a writer, I know it works. For whatever successes I enjoy in this column (and I hope there are some) are due mostly not to my expectations, but yours. Thanks.