Attributing a quality to someone is claimed to make them act on it.
Carnegie's advice is to describe the behaviour you want as though it were already the person's character. Expectancy research finds effects in this direction and finds them small, mediated by what the expecter then does differently rather than by the attribution itself. The maxim also has an obvious failure mode when the attribution is manifestly false.
In practice
- A manager who tells a team they are careful and then removes the checks has attributed rather than enabled.
- A pupil told he is good at a subject works at it, and the effect is smaller than the staffroom believes.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is consistency: a person given a described identity has an incentive to act consistently with it, and the describer treats them as though it were true, which changes the interaction.
- In its favour
- Expectancy research finds effects in this direction, and labelling studies show children told they are tidy behaving more tidily than those merely asked to be.
- Against it
- The nearest researched relative is the Pygmalion effect, whose measured size is modest and whose replication is uneven, and the maxim states as reliable what the evidence finds small and conditional.
- Standing
- The nearest researched relative is the Pygmalion effect, whose measured size is modest and whose replication is uneven. The maxim states a much stronger version than the evidence supports.
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- The folk laws of argument and attention