Galatea effect: do you believe in your possibilities?

"This child is stupid", "you will never get anywhere", "stop, you don't know how to do it." These phrases clearly reflect a negative expectation of the person to whom they refer. And not only that, but whether they are expressed or not, a series of actions will probably be carried out that will make the subject introject that idea and end up behaving in the expected way.

This is known as the Pygmalion effect. But there is also an effect related to the same situation, although from a different perspective: we are talking about the Galatea effect.

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The myth of Pygmalion and Galatea

To better understand how the Pygmalion effect and the Galatea effect work, it may help to see where these terms come from, his story being linked to mythology.

The Pygmalion myth presents him as king of Cyprus, who throughout his life had searched for the perfect woman to become her wife. However, she could not find anyone. The king decided to dedicate his time to sculpture, an art in which he excelled. He decided to represent the perfect woman in one of his plays,

creating an ivory statue of such perfection that he ended up falling in love with her. He called her Galatea and spent a long time admiring her. But the statue was still such a thing.

Pygmalion attended various religious celebrations and begged the gods to give him life, and Aphrodite, goddess of love and passion, responded to his pleas. Upon returning to his home, Pygmalion spent a long time looking sadly at Galatea, finally kissing her. But surprisingly he found the touch to be warm. With a second kiss, Galatea came to life, falling in love with Pygmalion.

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The Pygmalion effect

Through myth, we can observe how Pygmalion's wishes and expectations caused him to perform a series of actions that in turn would lead to those wishes and expectations coming true.

From the same myth, what is called the Pygmalion effect has been extrapolated, according to which the expectations we project in others they will cause us to take actions that in the long run will generate that type of behaviour. For example, if we think that a child is going to get nowhere and we unconsciously project on that idea, to the long the child is more likely to believe the same and end up fulfilling the behavior and role that was expected of he.

The Pygmalion effect is widely known in the world of psychology and education, being able to generate a great effect on individuals what others expect of them. But just as the expectations of others have an effect, so do your own. In this way we can observe the existence of another important complementary effect to this one. It's about the Galatea effect.

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The Galatea effect

The Galatea effect refers to the power that belief has with respect to one's own abilities and possibilities or the lack of these at the time of achieving or not the success in our objectives.

If a person feels safe and capable of achieving what he wants, he will have a much higher probability of achieving his goals since his behavior will be more oriented and focused on them. The subject will tend to depend more on his own effort and will feel much more committed to achieving the objectives.

On the contrary, someone who feels incapable of achieving what he wants, who lacks confidence, is not going to dare to go all out for his goals. He will tend to doubt, to make possible mistakes and failures visible, and his commitment to this will be more fragile, which effectively will be more likely than not fulfilling what was his goal.

Your relationship with the perception of others

The Galatea effect doesn't just have an internal connotation. Our self-perception and self-confidence is projected to the outside through our attitudes and behaviors, so that others will capture them and train an image of us based among other things on them.

The image they form will be more positive or negative depending on what they can capture, and that image will influence how they treat us. As an example, if they see us as someone weak they may be more likely to pretend to take advantage or well protect ourselves, while if we project a more determined image we may be admired or envy. Also in the expectations that others form of us

In the same way, the perception that others have of us and what they transmit to us will affect us. modifying our self-perception to some degree and with it our way of acting, which in turn makes the Galatea effect and the Pygmalion effect closely related.

However, what is most important in terms of predict our success or failure is what we think of ourselves and our chances of achieving it, since a person can succeed even if his environment does not believe in it, while someone who does not believe in himself will have it much more difficult even if his whole environment does. supports.

Linkage with locus of control

The Galatea effect is also related to the locus of control, understood as the link that we establish between what happens and what we do, that is, to the attribution of events to one's own performance or to other factors such as luck.

A person who believes that her successes are due to internal, stable and global factors will perform much more active and goal-directed behaviors, while someone who thinks that are due to external, unstable and particular factors may consider that his triumphs are not such but mere chance and therefore he will lose the motivation to fight for his objectives.

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