Our Monster Study
The damage of low expectations
“Treat a person as they can and should be, and they will become what they can and should be.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Our Monster Study
At the height of the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of American children lived in orphanages. Some had lost parents; many others had been placed there by families who simply couldn’t afford to feed them. There were no parents to look out for these children. No one to ask questions, push back, or take them home if something felt wrong. The young kids were dependent on the adults around them.
Which made them, as researchers of the era well understood, convenient subjects.
Imagine one of these kids in an Iowa orphanage in the 1930s. He doesn’t have much, but he does have one thing that comes naturally … his words. He talks, laughs, and tells stories without a second thought.
Then the adults around him start paying close attention to the way he talks.
They begin pointing out hesitations and stutters that don’t exist. They interrupt him more often and correct him mid-sentence and circle back to every small stumble. Over time, something begins to shift—not in his ability, but how he sees himself.
A new story starts to take hold. Something must be wrong with him. His words aren’t right and can’t be trusted. And before long, the voice that once came easily starts to lock up. The fluency disappears, and the confidence that used to carry him forward fades with it.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t an accident. It was a real experiment.
In the late 1930s, a University of Iowa speech pathologist named Wendell Johnson recruited orphaned children and split them into two groups. Half received encouragement and positive reinforcement. The other half were told, falsely, that they showed signs of stuttering, and then had their speech picked apart relentlessly, week after week.
Many in that second group developed real speech problems, along with emotional damage they carried for the rest of their lives. Johnson kept the study buried for decades, and when it finally surfaced in 2001 after Johnson had passed away, it was given a name that still feels too accurate: The Monster Study.
It’s easy to read a story like this and assume it belongs to a different time, under a different set of rules.
However, Wendell Johnson never saw himself as a monster. He believed he was doing meaningful work. What it seems he never fully recognized was what it means to hold influence over someone who trusts you; someone who has no reason not to believe what you tell them about themselves.
Doubt changes more than how people see themselves. It changes how we see them, too.
When we expect someone to struggle or fail, we subtly begin to treat them differently. We offer less support, even if we don’t realize it, we scrutinize more closely. We tend to jump in sooner, limit their opportunity to work through challenges, and often ease off the encouragement that helps people grow.
The person on the receiving end feels it all, and over time, it adds up. They start playing it safer and hesitate more. They shrink in moments where they used to step forward. And before long, they begin to confirm the very expectations that were placed on them.
We see this dynamic play out in sports all the time. Players whose coaches genuinely believe in them tend to get better instruction, more consistent feedback, and more room to develop and grow. Players who are quietly written off often receive less support, and more often than not, their performance reflects it.
The Monster Study is an extreme example, but the underlying truth shows up in much smaller ways every day for each of us … in practice, in the classroom, and around the dinner table.
Wendell Johnson thought he was running an experiment. He was … and so are you. What you believe about the people around you is already shaping them.
“People tend to become what the most important people in their lives think they will become.”
— John C. Maxwell
Connecting this quote to the story. The beliefs and labels we place on others often become the very identity and potential they grow into.
This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Think about the most important people in your life right now … your players, your kids, your team. What story are they telling themselves about who they are, and how much of that story came from you?