Michaela and Keely Podoll
When we were children, we learned that good people were beautiful and bad people were ugly (or at least, not as pretty). Cinderella and Prince Charming, for example, were much better looking than the stepsisters and stepmother. Even though fictional stories and pictures today don’t always follow this “rule,” it can still be seen in our assumptions about other people and things in the world. Every day we judge people, whether it’s their clothes or the way they do everyday things, and we get judged in return. Our first impression of how attractive someone is affects how we view that person. This is a phenomenon known as the Halo Effect. (Long-Crowell)
The Halo Effect is a bias in which our overall impression …show more content…
He made a study where he asked two commanding officers to examine their soldiers in terms of their physical qualities, such as: neatness, energy, and physique. He also had to examine their mental, emotional, and social qualities. Social qualities he was looking for include intellection, leadership, and responsibility. Thorndike found in his results that if one of the soldier’s qualities was highly rated, the other qualities were also rated highly, and vice versa. For example, if a soldier was rated as intelligent he was also rated to be neat and a good leader, while a soldier rated as irresponsible also tended to get low ratings on physique and energy. “Thorndike concluded that the correlations were too high and too even to be a simple coincidence, and called them a "halo error," referring to how the general perception of the individual created a halo around the person that blurred their individual characteristics.” (Halo Effect) A good example of this effect would be a politician who we trust to make good decisions for our government because he seems friendly and nice. This effect isn’t limited to the halo of saintliness either; other people have found a “devil-horns” effect in which a negative impression of a person makes us judge their character in a bad way. (Halo