The ‘Halo Effect’, also known as the ‘Halo Effect’, is a type of cognitive bias where our overall impression of a person also influences how we think about their character. Our thought towards someone as “She is beautiful” enables us to perceive other characteristics of that person as ‘beautiful’.
Let’s take a closer look at how the ‘Halo Effect’, which constantly affects us without noticing it in our daily lives, manipulates our judgments.
One of the best examples of the ‘Halo Effect’ is our impressions of celebrities and politicians.
For example, we tend to perceive celebrities as ‘successful, beautiful, attractive’ and also see them as ‘smart, funny, kind’. At the same time, we might think that a sympathetic politician is good at economics.
We characterize ‘beautiful’ people as ‘good’ in most areas.
Physical appearance is one of the important components of the ‘Halo Effect’. People included in the ‘beautiful’ attribute are more likely to be characterized by other positive traits.
This effect doesn’t just affect our perceptions of people based on beauty. At the same time, we may unconsciously encode ‘smart, attractive or funny’ people as more handsome or beautiful in our minds.
Psychologist Edward Thorndike conducted an interesting experiment on the US military in the 1920s.
The purpose of the experiment was to determine what effect evaluating one attribute would have on evaluating other attributes.
He asked the commanders in the army to evaluate the various qualities of their soldiers. These qualities included ‘intelligence, physical appearance, reliability, leadership’.
The ‘Halo Effect’ was real!
Considering the results of the experiment, negative evaluation of a certain attribute pushed other attributes to negative evaluation.
“The correlations were very high,” Thorndike noted. For example, the average correlation of physique with intelligence was 31, and people with leadership had a correlation of 39 with good physical appearance.
After Thorndike, different studies were carried out on this subject.
Several studies different from Thorndike’s study have supported that when we judge people as ‘handsome/beautiful’, we tend to believe that they have positive personality traits and that they are more intelligent.
However, not all studies yielded the same results. For example, in some studies, features such as ‘arrogant, manipulative, dishonest’ were attributed to ‘handsome’ people.
Another experiment was conducted, the results of which would astonish even the participants.
In the study conducted by Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy DeCamp Wilson at the University of Michigan in 1977, another experiment was conducted to prove the ‘Halo Effect’ hypothesis.
In this study, in which students were used as subjects, there were 118 participants, 62 males and 56 females. They were asked to rate the psychology instructor featured in a video.
The same teacher was harsh to one group and kind to the other group. Which group do you think gave the teacher a higher score?
Participants were randomly assigned to two groups, and both groups were shown one of two interviews given by a Belgian male teacher who spoke heavily accented English.
Teacher; he was respectful, flexible and enthusiastic towards the other group, while exhibiting cold, rigid and distrustful attitudes towards one of the groups. After watching the videos, the subjects were asked to rate the teacher’s attitude, accent, and physical appearance on an 8-point scale.
The students didn’t even know why they rated it like that!
Even the subjects were shocked by the results after the survey results were announced. They had no idea why one of the groups had rated it so highly.
It was evident that those who watched the teacher in a more ‘cold, strict, repulsive’ role rated the teacher’s other qualities, including his accent, low.
It has been proven again and again that the ‘Halo Effect’ really exists against our will.
When the subjects were asked, they said that they acted absolutely objectively and were not even aware of whether they were acting sympathetically or not.
The reason the ‘Halo Effect’ is so interesting anyway is because people can understand it but don’t realize it when it’s happening. Thus, this effect, which Thorndike suggested 50 years ago, was once again proven.
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