Your Lecturer's Face Shouldn't Matter. But Does It?

4 days ago
5 min read

What we found when we tested whether how your lecturer looks shapes how motivated you are to study.

*Talking about faces. Not thinking about mine.*

I was sitting in a meeting room last semester when a student said something that stuck with me. We were chatting casually after a feedback session, and she mentioned, almost as an aside, that she "just felt more motivated" in classes where the lecturer "looked like they had it together". I asked what she meant. She shrugged. "I don't know. Like, put-together. Professional. Attractive, I guess?"

She looked a bit embarrassed. I didn't push it.

But I couldn't stop thinking about it. Because she'd just described, in one offhand sentence, something researchers have been documenting for decades: the beauty premium. Attractive people earn more, get hired more, and are perceived as more competent. We know it operates in boardrooms and job interviews. But in classrooms? In the quiet, everyday question of do I actually feel like studying today?

Last year, I wrote a reflection on lookism culture that ended with a question: survival of the prettiest or survival of the fittest?

At the time, I didn't have data. I had opinions, a growing pile of papers on my desk, and the uneasy feeling that beauty was doing more work in higher education than any of us wanted to admit. The beauty premium is well-documented in the labour market. Attractive people earn more, get hired more often, and are rated as more competent (Eagly et al., 1991). But I kept wondering: does this reach into the classroom too? Not the hiring committee. The classroom. The place where students decide whether studying is worth the effort.

That student's comment turned a wondering into a research question. So I tested it.

But I didn't only test whether looks matter. I had another hunch, one that came from a completely different corner of my research.

For the past year, I've been exploring the psychology of awe - those moments when you encounter something vast and the self momentarily quiets down. One of the things that keeps surfacing in the awe literature is its relationship with humility: awe makes people feel smaller, more open, more willing to say I don't have this figured out (Stellar et al., 2018). And in my own data, it wasn't the dramatic, absorbing quality of awe that mattered most for well-being. It was connectedness - the feeling of being part of something larger than yourself.

If awe promotes humility, and humility fosters connectedness, I wondered: Does intellectual humility in the classroom do something similar? What if the lecturers who make students want to keep studying aren't the ones who perform expertise from a pedestal, but the ones who say I don't know, let's figure it out together?

So alongside the appearance question, I added a second one. We measured whether students perceived their lecturers as intellectually humble - open to being wrong, willing to consider other viewpoints, respectful of students' ideas (Leary et al.'s (2017)).

I had a quiet hunch about which predictor would matter more. The data confirmed it. But not in the way I expected.

What We Found

We surveyed approximately 200 Gen Z university students across Malaysia, with my collaborators, Dr Fong (Elsie) and Dr Yi Shan, asking about the social pressure they felt to study, how attractive they perceived their lecturers to be, and how intellectually humble they found them. We then measured their academic confidence and their motivation to keep studying on a regular basis.

Two findings stood out.

The first was uncomfortable. Perceived instructors' attractiveness predicted students' academic confidence. Not their study motivation directly - it didn't reach that far. But it shaped how capable students believed themselves to be, and that confidence was what drove their desire to study. Social pressure from family and peers worked the same way: it built confidence, and confidence did the rest.

Why would a lecturer's face shape a student's belief in their own abilities? It doesn't make rational sense. But the halo effect rarely does. We tend to attribute all sorts of positive qualities, competence, warmth, and credibility to people we find physically attractive (Eagly et al., 1991). If a student unconsciously reads an attractive lecturer as more competent, they might feel they're getting better instruction, which (may) feed into I think I can handle this.

The beauty premium doesn't stop at the boardroom. It reaches into classrooms - not by directly shaping whether students want to study, but by quietly influencing how capable they believe themselves to be.

I won't pretend I was comfortable reading this in the output. As a lecturer, the idea that my students' academic confidence might be partly shaped by something as arbitrary as how I look is not a pleasant one. But discomfort doesn't make a finding less real. And ignoring it doesn't make it go away.

The second finding was the one I kept coming back to. Intellectual humility didn't work through confidence at all. It bypassed it entirely. Students who perceived their lecturers as intellectually humble were more motivated to keep studying, and this had nothing to do with how confident they felt.

Perceived attractiveness made students feel they could succeed. Intellectual humility made students feel they wanted to keep studying. Those are two very different things.

Think about what that means. Perceived attractiveness made students feel they could succeed - it built confidence, and confidence drove motivation. But intellectual humility skipped that step entirely. It didn't make students feel more capable. It made them want to keep studying anyway. Something about a lecturer who admits they don't have all the answers, who treats a student's half-formed idea as worth engaging with rather than correcting - that was enough. Not enough to boost confidence. Enough to make students want to come back.

I keep returning to that word: enough. Because we spend so much time in academia worrying about the wrong things. About looking competent. About performing certainty. About never showing the gaps. And here's the data quietly suggesting that the gaps might be the point. That the admission of not-knowing creates exactly the kind of space students want to inhabit.

We can't redesign our faces. But we can redesign how we show up intellectually in the classroom.

A Note for Fellow Lecturers

I can't control how students see me. Neither can you.

But I can control whether I say "that's a great question, and I honestly don't know the answer," instead of bluffing through it. I can control whether I pause and genuinely consider a student's perspective before responding. I can control whether my classroom feels like a performance or a conversation.

If this study tells us anything, it's that the most powerful thing a lecturer can do might not be looking the part. It might be showing students that not having all the answers is not a weakness; it's an invitation.

The attractiveness finding is real. But it's indirect and modest. The intellectual humility finding is direct, and it points to something we can actually change.

So if you're a fellow lecturer quietly wondering whether your face is working for or against you, it might be. A little. But what's working more is whether your students leave your class feeling like their thinking mattered.

That's the part we get to choose.

What's Next

There's a thread running through my recent work, from awe to appearance to this study, and it keeps pointing in the same direction. The moments that matter aren't the ones where someone performs certainty or beauty or authority. They're the ones where someone is honest about what they don't know and makes space for others to think alongside them.

I don't have the full picture yet. But I'm paying attention.