Robert Rosenthal, a psychologist renowned as an expert in nonverbal communication, and in particular what he called the “self-fulfilling prophecies” in which subtle, often unconscious, gestures can influence behavior, died on Jan. 5 in Riverside, Calif. He was 90.
His daughter Ginny Rosenthal Mahasin said the cause of death, in a hospital, was an aneurysm.
Widely considered one of the leading social psychologists of the 20th century, Dr. Rosenthal, who spent much of his career at Harvard, was best known for his work in the 1960s on what he called the Pygmalion effect — or, more technically, “interpersonal expectancy.”
In one famous experiment, he gave an aptitude test to students at a California elementary school, then told teachers that a group of the students were set to “blossom” in the next year, while another one wasn’t. In fact, the two groups were selected at random, though the teachers didn’t know that.
A year later, he retested the students and found that those in the “blossom” group had gained an average of 27 I.Q. points, regardless of how they scored initially, while the other group performed much worse.
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