The Effect of Physical Attractiveness on Teacher Expectations

Abstract

Rosenthal and Jacobson found that a teacher's expectations about a child's behavior strongly influence his actual behavior. Generally, teachers form their first impressions of children, and thus develop their expectations for them, from two sources of information-the children's school record and their physical appearance. In this experiment, teachers were given objective information, presumably about a child's scholastic and social potential, ac- companied by a photograph of an attractive or an unattractive boy or girl. It was found that the child's attractiveness was significantly associated with the teacher's expectations about how intelligent the child was, how interested in education his parents were, how far he was likely to progress in school, and how popular he would be with his peers. ROSENTHAL AND JACOBSON (1968) argue that a teacher's expecta- tions as to how a child will behave have an enormous impact on how the child does behave. To prove this assertion, they con- ducted an experiment in a public elementary school. They gave students a standard IQ test, telling the teachers that this test mea- sured blooming. The researchers chose 20 per cent of the children at random, and informed their teachers that the test had identified them as very special children who would bloom (show a marked intellectual spurt) within the next year. One year after this deception, the same IQ test was again administered to all children. The results revealed -that the teachers' expectations did in- deed have an enormous impact on students' performance. The supposed bloomers showed far more improvement in IQ than did the other youngsters; gains were especially pronounced for the * This research was financed in part by NIMH Grant MH 1661, NSF Grant GS