Can success be manufactured?

Imagine you are a manager directly supervising 10 employees. All of these employees are new hires and you don’t know any of them personally. The only information you have about them is from their resume. 3 of the new hires went to great schools, 3 of them have a lot of strategic work experience, and the other 4 were generally average in these areas- but had other varied strengths. Which of the three groups do you think will perform best overall?

Your answer to that question actually determines the outcome. How? Sociologist Robert Merton noticed that subjects in the experiments he studied tended to always do about as well as it was expected they would do. This may seem obvious, but the findings suggest that an outcome can be predetermined by an expectation- which is literally akin to predicting the future. Essentially, if it is anticipated that someone will be successful… they achieve greatness. On the other hand, if it is believed that a person will fail- they likely do.

Back to our fake manager scenario. If you personally held the belief that people who graduate from top tier* universities are generally smarter and more talented than those who graduate from average universities- then you will expect…