The students thought they were helping the psychology department check its teaching evaluations.
There were 118 of them, from introductory psychology at the University of Michigan, brought in groups to a conference room with a television. The department, they were told, had collected end-of-term ratings of its instructors on everything from teaching to appearance and mannerisms. Could a brief videotaped interview predict those ratings?
First everyone watched a filler tape: a pleasant instructor answering questions about his teaching. Then came the tape that mattered. The man on it was a Belgian whose first language was French, and he spoke English with a fairly pronounced accent. Half the students saw him warm. He liked discussion, he said, and set papers his students seemed to enjoy. The other half saw the same man, answering the same questions coldly. Discussion? There was “a time to be a student and a time to be a professor.” Weekly quizzes, because otherwise “you can’t trust them to do the reading.” Each version ran about seven minutes.
The students rated how much they would like him, then rated his physical appearance, his mannerisms and his accent on a scale from extremely appealing to extremely irritating.
The warm version won on likability, as it was built to. What Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson were watching was the rest of the form. A substantial majority of the warm group found his appearance appealing, while a substantial majority of the cold group found it irritating. About half the warm group liked his accent; in the cold group, the overwhelming majority found it irritating.
To rule out the obvious objection, that he may have frowned more in the cold role, they showed both tapes with the sound off to 34 other students. Rated in silence, his looks and mannerisms came out almost identical.
Then they asked about awareness. Most students denied that liking him had affected their ratings of his traits. Asked the reverse, the students who had seen him cold said, on balance, that his traits had lowered their liking. Questioned afterward, most held to their denials, some warily and some heatedly. One young woman said: “Before he even began talking, I made my judgment about his appearance and then I stuck with it.”
The authors allowed one logical escape: perhaps the man’s looks and accent were simply unattractive, and the cold group was partly right. But in that case, they noted, the warm group had been wrong to believe those same features had no effect on their liking.
The man never changed. The students’ description of him did, and they put the cause on the wrong side.