Chapter 1: 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?
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Chapter 2: 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. So we're looking at everything on the low end of the scale. But we found that grandiose narcissistic students, so these students who think they're the best thing since sliced bread and whatever they want should be handed to them.
They were more likely to think that their professors are flirting with them, more likely to say they like, yeah, I flirted with professors, and more likely to think that this flirting is just happening more often all over the place. So like, yeah, my friends do this with their professors and their professors do it with them.
Whereas vulnerable narcissistic students, so people who think the world has wronged them. So, you know, woe is me. I deserve special treatment because of that. They thought that other people were doing it, but they didn't necessarily think that they were doing it themselves because they have the idea of like, oh, I'm like so ugly.
My professor would never flirt with me and I'm just too shy to flirt with a professor and stuff. But all these other people are doing it.
But they have this feeling that like everyone's gaming the system, but them kind of thing, even though that may not be true and it's not true.
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