Effects of Students' Physical Attractiveness and Name Popularity on Student Teachers' Perceptions of Social and Academic Attributes

Abstract

Summary Student teacher Ss (44 male, 97 female) rated six academic attributes and five social attributes of fictitious seventh-grade boys on the basis of school records. These records included pictures of students varying in attractiveness and first names varying in popularity. The Ss rated all academic attributes prior to rating all social attributes in order to prevent the latter ratings from biasing the former ratings (“halo” effects). Attractive students received significantly higher evaluations than unattractive students on all ratings of social attributes but on none of the ratings of academic attributes. All predicted name popularity effects and all Attractiveness x Name Popularity interactions were nonsignificant. Discrepancies between these results and those of earlier studies might be due to possible “halo” effects in those studies or to the possibility (suggested by earlier research) that attractiveness and name popularity affect the expectations of experienced teachers more than the expectations of student teachers.