Halo Effect

Halo Effects

Upendo Sempambo

Grandview University

Introduction

When I was reading the textbook I came across Halo Effects, I found it very interesting, and I wanted to know more about it. The halo effect is a type of cognitive bias in which our overall impression of a person influences how we feel and think about his or her character. Essentially, our overall impression of a person impacts our evaluations of that person's specific traits. One great example of the halo effect in action is our overall impression of celebrities. Since we perceive them as attractive, successful, and often likeable, we also tend to see them as intelligent, kind, and funny. Below are some the articles I read in regards to the Halo effects and how it’s an everyday practice. The articles explain what a Halo effect is, who first described it, tests/studies done to prove it exist and how it affects our everyday lives and decision making. They also explain how it affects business and contaminates data information in companies.

Halo Effect. (2013, April 1). Retrieved April 22, 2015, from http://www.beinghuman.org/article/halo-effect

In the article the author states that the halo effect is a bias in which our overall impression of a person (a figurative halo) colors our judgment of that person’s character. The research into the halo effect shows that a person's positive qualities, physical appearance, and general attractiveness affects how we judge their character, the better they look and behave, the better a person we judge them to be.

The author uses psychologist Edward Thorndike who first described the Halo Effect in 1920 through a study he did with two commanding officers. 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, positive or negative, around the person that blurred their individual characteristics. The author mentioned...