105 soldiers were about to participate in a grueling fifteen-week commander traning program. It was a rigorous and intense process, requiring harsh physical training, mental concentration, and sisteen-hour workdays.
The would be commander didn’t know it, but this particularl course was going to be different from any to date. Before this session’s classes started, psychologist Dov Eden informed the training officers leading hte program that the army had accumulated comprehensive data on each of hte trainees including, Eden explained, “psychological test scores, sociometric data from the previous course, and ratings by previous commanders.”
Based on this comprehensive information, Eden told the officers, each soldier had been classified into on of three “Command Potential’ (CP) catagories: “high,” “regular,” and “unknown” (due to insufficient information). Trainees from each classification were divided equally into the four trainee classes. “You will copy each trainee’s CP,” Eden told the officers, “into his personal record. You are requested to learn you trainees’ names and their predicted CP by the begninning of the course.”
The trainees, of course, had no idea that any of this was going on. And the officers didn’t know that the so-called command potential, along with all the supporting data, was completely bogus. Scores were randomly assigned to the trainees and had nothing to do with their intelligence, past performance, or ability.
Nonetheless, when Eden returned fifteen weeks later, he discovered something remarkable. At the end of the course, the soldiers took a paper-and-pencil test that measured their new knowledge of “combat tactics, topography, standard operation procedures, and such practical skills as navigation and accuracy of weapon firing.” This test wasn’t rigged; it was part of normal procedure, a standardized assessment all soldiers took at the end of their training. This is wehre the effects of assigning soldiers to the different command potential categories beame apparent. The soldiers whom the training officers THOUGHT had a high CP score peformed much beter on the test (scoring and average of 79.88) than the “unknown and “regular” conunterparts (who scored 72.43 and 65.18, respectively). Simply being labeled, however arbitrarily, as having high leadership potential translated directly into actual improved ability-improved by a staggering 22.7 percent…without realizing it, the trainees had taken on the characteristics of the diagnosis ascribed to them.
