Study: Attractive Women Fare Worse in Remote Exams
05:43 GMT 31.10.2022 (Updated: 10:42 GMT 21.04.2023)
© Photo : Mihaela Noroc
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The study, based on real examples from the pandemic era, reinforced the hypothesis that good-looking people are often attributed positive qualities they don’t necessarily have, including intelligence. Tellingly, both male and female teachers have been found to discriminate in favor of attractive women.
Attractive female students' grades have been found to drop when they were not physically present and participated in digital learning programs instead, new research from Lund University has shown.
In the research, good-looking female students’ grades in qualitative subjects dropped during the pandemic, whereas the male students' results remained unchanged during the same circumstances.
The so-called appearance effect was most visible in subjects where teachers and students usually get to know each other, with courses structured in a way that involves interaction between teachers and students in a physical environment.
The students' attractiveness was judged by a jury consisting of 74 people of the same age as the study's 300 students. Subsequently, their results were compared before and during the pandemic.
The students' attractiveness was judged by a jury consisting of 74 people of the same age as the study's 300 students. Subsequently, their results were compared before and during the pandemic.
“Most of the teachers are men, so it is reasonable that they mainly discriminate in favor of the attractive women. On the other hand, female teachers also gave the good-looking women higher marks, although to a lesser extent,” Adrian Mehic of the Lund School of Economics, the author of the study, said in a statement.
Mehic cited previous research that indicated that good-looking people are often attributed positive qualities they don’t necessarily have, including intelligence, and ventured that the female teachers “recognized themselves” in attractive women, adding that humans are known to treat their perceived peers better than those whom they don't consider their peers.
“When the teaching was carried out remotely, the teachers could not see the appearance of the students in the same way as when the teaching was in-situ. In addition, there are fewer opportunities for interaction between students and teachers in digital teaching. This resulted in lower grades,” Mehic concluded.
Previous research indicated that apart from intelligence, humans subconsciously attribute other positive characteristics, such as honesty and compassion, to physically attractive people. This is sometimes referred to as the halo effect, or the ‘beautiful-is-good’ effect. Across cultures, whatever is associated with beauty is assumed to be good, whereas attractive people are assumed to be more outgoing, popular, and happy.
