Hot or Not: Do Professors Perceived as Physically Attractive Receive Higher Student Evaluations?

ABSTRACT. Previous research investigating the influence of perceived physical attractive-ness on student evaluations of college professors has been limited to a handful of studies. In this study, the authors used naturally occurring data obtained from the publicly available Web site www.ratemyprofessors.com. The data suggested that professors perceived as attractive received higher student evaluations when compared with those of a nonattractive control group (matched for department and gender). Results were consistent across 4 separate uni-versities. Professors perceived as attractive received student evaluations about 0.8 of a point higher on a 5-point scale. Exploratory analyses indicated benefits of perceived attractiveness for both male and female professors. Although this study has all the limitations of natural-istic research, it adds a study with ecological validity to the limited literature. Key Words: naturalistic research, physical attractiveness, student evaluations, teacher characteristics OUR PURPOSE IN THE PRESENT STUDY was to investigate whether college professors perceived as physically attractive received higher student evaluations compared with colleagues that were perceived as nonattractive. To begin investi-gating this topic, we reviewed some relevant literature. First, research results indicate that a variety of factors influence student eval-uations of college professors (for pertinent reviews, see Cashin & Downey, 1992