Flirting for Extra Credit: What Students Think
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What ethical concerns arise from student-professor flirting?
Broadcasting intimate details and useless information from an undisclosed location in New York City. The Last Show with David Cooper Student professor flirting. It sounds like a campus rom-com movie plot line. Sounds innocent enough. Until you think about how it actually plays out in real life and you factor in, I don't know, the power dynamics involved. You factor in the ethics of winking between you and your hot professor. There's some ugly stuff behind that wink. Well, new research suggests students high in narcissistic traits are more likely to see those blurred boundaries that student professor flirting as less morally troubling. I am troubled by that. And I'm here with one of the authors of this research, an experimental psychology researcher, Brayden Hall from the University of Alabama.
Brayden, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Before we get into what students think of student professor flirting, how much of a real problem is it? Are we talking little bits of awkwardness, no big deal, or something kind of structurally concerning when it happens?
Yeah, so it's obviously not like a rampant problem that we're trying to rein in on campuses all over the country. But in sort of recent years, universities have become a little more conscious about trying to put a stop to it. So in the paper we mentioned, I forget some university in England, I think they recently changed their policy to explicitly ban flirting between students and faculty members, which wasn't explicitly banned before. So nowadays, some students tend to have a little more entitlement. So we wonder whether they are more out to think that they can flirt with their professor. So it's not like perhaps a rampant problem, but the times that it is a problem, it can become a very serious problem.
Sure, a school in England tried to ban it, but I feel like you studied a thing that most universities would just rather not talk about. What made you think like, yes, an academic paper about flirting in universities, this is what we need right now?
Yeah, so a lot of people ask me that question. So I've always been like, I research flirting all the time. And I've always been very fascinated at sort of flirting in somewhat inappropriate dynamics. And just going to a big school in undergrad, I noticed that some students would be a little flirty with their professors, typically the students who could probably gain something from doing it. And then I read a paper that was done in like the 80s that studied this and no one has studied it since. So I just became interested in seeing whether this was still a thing that was still happening and people still thought it was happening.
I think we all intuitively know what flirting is, but what counted as flirting in your study? Is it just like complimenting an outfit?
How do narcissistic traits influence perceptions of flirting?
Is it sitting provocatively on the professor's desk in office hours? Like, what are the things that you would quantify as flirting?
Yeah, so we had about 20 different behaviors that we gave participants to look at, which we piloted from a list of like 80 something behaviors. And yeah, most of the behaviors are meant to be suggestive of some sort of romantic or sexual interest, but not reaching the level of sexual harassment. So we didn't have anything like touching your professor or inappropriately or like touching students and things like that. But we had things, yeah, like sitting on a desk, wearing particularly revealing clothing to a professor's class, calling on a student all the time, referencing that you're single. So little minor things like that. Yeah.
I'm just picturing myself as an undergrad telling a professor that I'm going into their office and I say I'm single. They would say, get the heck out. But also, I'm not attractive. So maybe that's the issue. OK, back to the findings. Like, what do students make of flirting and what kinds of students think it's no big deal?
Yes. So overall, yeah, participants, all of the undergraduate students we had in the study saw flirting as like this very uncommon thing that happens.
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