The halo effect

Do you trust appearances? When we create an opinion about someone based on some physical trait, almost without realising it, this can lead to a misinterpretation of information, which influences the way we process thoughts, make judgements or decisions.

When we see an attractive person, we may tend to think that they are also intelligent or kind, without having any concrete information to support these assumptions. This is the halo effect.

Cameron Herrin

The image in this publication is of Cameron Herrin, who killed a woman and her baby. Would you have ever said it by looking at his picture? There are other cases closer to home, such as that of Daniel Sancho, who is still awaiting sentencing and who is said to have murdered and dismembered his romantic partner.

In the same way, if someone makes a mistake in a task, we might think that they are incompetent in general, even if the conclusion is exaggerated and not based on a full assessment of their abilities.

The halo effect can, of course, influence decision-making, how impressions of people are formed and, above all, how information gathered is interpreted .

Psychologists such as Dennis (2007) or Myers (2008) say that this happens because humans tend to associate the beautiful with the good, i.e. we associate with beautiful people the most positive attributes, while ugly or unattractive people are associated with the most negative characteristics.

Why does this happen? Nisbett and Wilson, in 1977 tried to explain it: by having a positive first impression, the subsequent overall evaluation will be good, and vice versa . This reflects the great importance of the primacy effect, i.e. what we know as “the first image”.

Edward Lee Thorndike first described this phenomenon in 1920, and other psychologists have worked on his thesis, such as Solomon Asch, who claims that physical attractiveness is the variable that most evokes the halo effect.

Daniel Kahneman studied this phenomenon in detail and explains how this bias is part of every area of our lives . For example, the University of New England in Australia conducted a study to see whether their teachers’ grading of students was mediated by this cognitive bias. Today they have strategies to ensure that the assessment is always as neutral as possible because people make value judgements regularly because our brains need to get a quick idea of what is around us.

We live in a world of appearances in which beauty is a passport that can make it easier for many people to achieve goals and be valued for a positive feature of their image, with a perfect smile, a way of dressing… that someone who does not fit this model is ruled out for many things, including finding a partner.

Making value judgements is natural, and we do it, almost always, without bad intentions. The sense is evolutionary, as they anticipate possible aggressions. These judgements are often the result of social learning (family, friends, media…) and through them, we end up conditioning our personal relationships.

Sexologist Helen S. Kaplan found a curious difference between genders: women are influenced by the halo effect only when presented with people of the opposite gender, but when they are of the same sex, they tend to evaluate attractiveness negatively. These results were not found in men.

Finally, the halo effect is applicable to all kinds of situations, from politics, to job interviews, marketing, etc. and the other side of the coin is the devil effect, which is identical to the halo effect, but in reverse: it occurs when specific aspects of a person are judged negatively if the overall impression of that person is negative.

📎 Alcaine, A. [Albert]. (2024, 25 July). The halo effect. PsicoPop. https://www.psicopop.top/en/halo-effect/

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