Psychology: The Halo Effect - How our Decisions can be Influenced by Radiant Beauty (part 2)

But there's also evidence that also later at school attractive children profit from their attractiveness halo. Because like Karen Deon could show in one of her famous studies that teachers are influenced by beauty as well. In her study she presented different cases of children's transgressions to all in all 243 participants. Different groups of participants were presented written descriptions of a child's misbehavior which could be either mild, for example the child was said to have walked up quietly behind a sleeping dog and stepped on its tail causing it to yelp. Whereas in the severe condition the child was said to have walked up to a dog sleeping in the corner of a playground and that it took some sharp stones from the ground and threw the stones at the dog severely hurting the dog because two stones struck the dog and cut its leg so that the animal jumped up yelping and limped away. But Peter, that was the name of the evil kid, Peter continued to throw rocks at it as it tried to move away from him. So the participants were presented with these examples of a kid's misbehavior and attached to their documents were either pictures of a good-looking child or of a less attractive child. As a result it turned out that the severe transgressions committed by attractive children tended to be evaluated less negative. And, and this is very interesting, in case of the less attractive kid the misbehavior was attributed to a behavior disposition. So why did the kid do this? Well, because he's an evil kid. On the other hand the behavior of the good-looking children was more frequently attributed to situational factors which means, well, maybe the kid just had a bad day and that's why he tortured the dog. But not only our judgments of behavior can be influenced by the attractiveness halo but also our judgments of intelligence and achievements. Maybe you've already heard of the study by Landy and Siegel. In this study 60 male, this is important, 60 male undergraduate students were presented different essays which were either poorly written, very superficial or very well written, well structured and without any flaws. But in one group the picture of a really good-looking female was attached to the essay and in another group there was a picture of a less attractive female and in the third group there was no picture at all. With all we've heard about the halo effect you can already guess what happened. Well, especially in case of the very poorly written essays the attached picture of a good-looking female seemed to improve the quality of the essay. So especially in cases in which we don't have too much information about somebody and we just have a picture of somebody in these situations the halo effect can be very strong and only as soon as we get more and more information about somebody we can counteract these effects. So fortunately at school teachers are not only presented a picture of a student, they have the chance to gather much more information about somebody. So in the field there is probably still some kind of halo effect, we can't deny that, but it's hopefully not that strong. And the more you become aware of these effects and that they are threatening equity the more you can prevent making bad decisions.