Dr Joshua Fullard, MiSoC Research Associate and Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, describes his new research, Student preferences over their teachers’ demographic characteristics: Evidence from three experiments, published in the Oxford Review of Education.
“Think about what it takes to study abroad. You apply to a university in a country you may never have visited. You get a visa, find somewhere to live and, at some point, you get on a plane and leave your family, friends, and most of what feels like home behind. If anyone has demonstrated a preference for the unfamiliar it is the international student.
In my latest research, published in the Oxford Review of Education, I how that these same students prefer to be taught by educators who looked like them across three separate experiments.
The person who got on a plane to experience something new still found themselves drawn, when choosing a teacher, towards the familiar.
Hot and cold decision
My colleague, George Loewenstein, identified something important about how humans make choices across different emotional states. When we are calm, in what he called a “cold” state, we make decisions that reflect our values and long-term goals. But when we are emotionally active, in a “hot” state, our decisions are shaped more by immediate needs. Crucially, people in cold states consistently underestimate how differently they will behave when they are in a hot state.
This distinction maps almost perfectly onto the apparent paradox in my research.
Choosing to study abroad is a cold state decision. It is made from home, in a position of security and ambition. You are thinking about your future self: who you want to become and what you want to experience.
Choosing who teaches you is made in a very different condition. You are already navigating an unfamiliar city, sitting in lectures with hundreds of strangers, adjusting to a new academic culture that might not match your expectations. You might be homesick and almost certainly under pressure to perform in an elite academic environment. You are, in Loewenstein’s terms, in a much hotter state.
It is the change in the emotional state that the decision is made that appears to drive this apparent contradiction.
To illustrate this further my research found that the strongest preference for demographically similar teachers is among international students with poorer mental health. That is, those who are in a warmer emotional state more strongly gravitate toward a teacher who shares their background.
A question of culture
In one of my experiments, I investigate the role of ethnicity and culture separately. In this experiment students were shown teacher names that combined an ethnically distinct surname with a common British forename (e.g., James Singh or Emily Chen). I found that the preference for same-ethnicity teachers disappeared entirely. International students only show preferences to be taught by a teacher with an ethnically distinct forename and matching surname.
This means that students are not responding to ancestry in some abstract sense. Students are responding to an identity. This matters because the need being expressed here is not a desire to be taught by people who share your genetic heritage. It is a need for cultural intelligibility. The idea that someone in the room might understand you in a wider sense. This is a recognised human need, and it becomes important when the emotional conditions of decision-making are most demanding.
What this tells us about people
The implications of this research are not really about university. They are about understanding the role that emotional states have on decision making. The apparent contradiction in international students’ choices is not a contradiction once you understand the emotional conditions that each decision was made in. We should view this with empathy rather than judgement. A person whose behaviour shifts between hot and cold states is not being inconsistent. They are responding to the conditions they find themselves in.
The same distinction has consequence for one of the most charged political debates of our time: immigration.
Public attitudes towards immigration are routinely described as contradictory. People express support for diversity in the abstract while, at the same time, report discomfort when their own neighbourhood becomes more diverse. This is often portrayed as proof that what people say in the abstract might not reflect how they actually feel.
But Loewenstein’s framework suggests something more charitable. Forming a view on immigration is a cold state decision. A considered, values-driven view about the kind of society one wants to live in. Feeling unsettled by a change in one’s community, often reinforced by wider economic conditions, is a hot state response – a reaction made at a moment of social or emotional pressure.
Both views can be sincere. They are just operating under very different emotional conditions, driven by very different human needs.
Let me make it clear that none of this means that anxieties about immigration are always well-founded and that prejudice does not exist. It does. I am arguing that when someone is in an emotionally hot state the pull towards the familiar is not a moral failure. It is a predictable, human response to feeling that the conditions of daily life have shifted beyond one’s control. In a debate as politically charged as immigration, a little more humanity in how we interpret each other might go further than we think.”