Psychology: The Halo Effect - How our Decisions can be Influenced by Radiant Beauty (part 1)
Jan 29, 2025
In the 1920s Edward Thorndike discovered that when people were asked to rate another person, their ratings were strongly influenced by single personality traits (e.g. appearance).
He called this phenomenon the "halo effect"...
www.learningpsychology.net
Author: Eskil Burck (degreed psychologist)
Hello and welcome back to the world of psychology. The halo effect.
How our decisions can be influenced by a radiant beauty. Let's begin with a little experiment.
I'm going to introduce two men to you. One is Alan and the other guy is Ben.
And all I want to know from you is who do you feel more sympathy for? Who do you like more?
So on the one hand we have Alan. Alan is intelligent, industrious, impulsive,
critical, stubborn and envious. On the other hand we have Ben. Ben is
envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious and intelligent.
So who do you like more? The first guy Alan or the other guy Ben? Probably your heart was beating
for the first guy Alan. Even though you might have guessed that even though the two guys were
described by exactly the same traits. They just had a different order. The reason for this effect
in fact there are two psychological effects at play. First we have a so-called primacy effect
which means information that are presented in the beginning are getting more attention and
they have a bigger impact. So first impressions are really very important.
And on the other hand we have the so-called halo effect which means that our impression
of a person or an object is strongly influenced by one or maybe two very dominant traits.
So in case of Alan all we hear in the beginning is he is intelligent and industrious and all the
other traits we interpret in the light in the halo of these two very positive traits.
Whereas in the case of Ben all we hear in the beginning is that he is envious and stubborn
and so we are already influenced in a negative way and even the two positive attributes in the
end industrious and intelligent are not going to change the already formed negative halo.
The injustice evoked by halo effects can be observed very early in life. For example in 2001
Lina Badre and Bahia Abdalla published a study in which they had observed physical attractive
infants had better health outcomes than less attractive infants. The good-looking babies
did not only gain weight faster but also the time they had to be in hospital was shorter.
And it seems that the reason for this was that the neonatal nurses responded
more to the prettier faces of the infants and so they probably took better care.