the halo effect experiment hypothesis

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The Halo Effect

Nisbett and wilson' experiment, nisbett and wilson' experiment.

The Halo Effect perfectly fits the situation of Hollywood celebrities where people readily assume that since these people are physically attractive, it also follows that they are intelligent, friendly, and display good judgment as well. This also greatly applies to other well-known people such as politicians.

This article is a part of the guide:

• Social Psychology Experiments
• Milgram Experiment
• Bobo Doll Experiment
• Stanford Prison Experiment
• Asch Experiment

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• 1 Social Psychology Experiments
• 2.1 Asch Figure
• 3 Bobo Doll Experiment
• 4 Good Samaritan Experiment
• 5 Stanford Prison Experiment
• 6.1 Milgram Experiment Ethics
• 7 Bystander Apathy
• 8 Sherif’s Robbers Cave
• 9 Social Judgment Experiment
• 10 Halo Effect
• 11 Thought-Rebound
• 12 Ross’ False Consensus Effect
• 13 Interpersonal Bargaining
• 14 Understanding and Belief
• 15 Hawthorne Effect
• 16 Self-Deception
• 17 Confirmation Bias
• 18 Overjustification Effect
• 19 Choice Blindness
• 20.1 Cognitive Dissonance
• 21.1 Social Group Prejudice
• 21.2 Intergroup Discrimination
• 21.3 Selective Group Perception

Research Question

Nisbett and Wilson's experiment aimed to address and find an answer to the question regarding people's awareness of the halo effect.

The researchers believe that people have little awareness of the nature of the halo effect, and that it influences their personal judgments, inferences and the production of a more complex social behavior.

The Experiment

In this experiment, college students as participants were asked to evaluate a psychology instructor as they view him in a videotaped interview. The instructor will be evaluated on several different dimensions.

The students were divided into two groups, and each were shown one of two different interviews with the same instructor who is a native French-speaking Belgian who spoke English with a fairly noticeable accent.

In one video, the instructor presented himself as someone likeable, respectful of his students' intelligence and motives, flexible in his approach to teaching and enthusiastic about his subject matter. In the other interview, he presented himself in an entirely different way, in an unlikeable way to be specific. He was cold and distrustful toward the students and was quite rigid in his teaching style.

After watching the videos, the subjects were asked to rate the lecturer on physical appearance, mannerisms and his accent. It should be noted that the mannerisms and accent were kept the same in both versions of videos.

After viewing the interview, subjects were asked how much they think they liked the teacher. The subjects will be rating him on an 8-point scale ranging from "like extremely" to dislike extremely."

Subjects were also told that the researchers were interested in knowing "how much their liking for the teacher influenced the ratings they just made. Other subjects were asked to identify how much the characteristics they just rated influenced their liking of the teacher.

Surprisingly, after responding to the questionnaire, the respondents were puzzled about their reactions to the videotapes and to the questionnaire items.

The students had no clue why they gave one lecturer higher ratings. Most said that how much they liked the lecturer from what he said had not affected their evaluation of his individual characteristics at all.

From the results, the subjects were obviously unaware of the halo effect and the nature of the influence of global evaluation on their ratings.

The results also indicate that global evaluations alter evaluations of attributes about which the individual has information fully sufficient to allow for an independent assessment. The subjects were convinced that they made their judgment about the lecturer's physical appearance, mannerisms and accent without considering how likeable he was.

Application

The halo effect has now become a business model; hence it has become well known in the business world. Marketing specialists make use of associations to well known brands or names to make their product appear better. Attaching a popular designer name to a simple pair of jeans incredibly raises its market value.

What's fascinating about the halo effect is that, people may be aware of and understand the particular phenomenon, but they have no idea when it is already happening. Without realizing it, we naturally make judgments. And then, even when it's pointed to us, we still deny that it is a product of the halo effect phenomenon.

The Halo Effect: When Your Own Mind is a Mystery

Wikipedia.com: Halo Effect

The Halo Effect: Evidence for Unconscious Alteration of Judgments by Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy DeCamp Wilson (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1977, Vol.35, No.4, 250-256)

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Explorable.com (Jan 26, 2010). The Halo Effect. Retrieved Sep 17, 2024 from Explorable.com: https://explorable.com/halo-effect

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Halo Effect In Psychology: Definition and Examples

Ayesh Perera

B.A, MTS, Harvard University

Ayesh Perera, a Harvard graduate, has worked as a researcher in psychology and neuroscience under Dr. Kevin Majeres at Harvard Medical School.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

The halo effect refers to the tendency to allow one specific trait or our overall impression of a person, company or product to positively influence our judgment of their other related traits.

The halo effect is a cognitive attribution bias, involving the unfounded application of general judgment to a specific trait (Bethel, 2010; Ries, 2006).

For example, suppose you perceive a person to be warm and friendly. In that case, you will attribute a number of other associated traits to that person without any knowledge that they are true, such as they are generous.

The word ‘halo’ stems from a religious concept. It refers to a circle of light that is placed above or around the head of a holy person or saint in order to honor his or her sanctity. Countless paintings from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance period depict notable men and women with the heavenly light of the halo.

These paintings, in effect, lead the observer to form favorable judgments about their participants. Likewise, according to the psychological concept of ‘the halo effect,’ one patent attribute of a certain person leads an observer to draw a generalizing conclusion about that person (Ellis, 2018).

A single positive quality of a person may induce a positive predisposition toward every aspect of that person while one negative attribute of that person may induce an overall negative impression of that person.

While the former, which works in the positive direction, is the halo effect, the latter, which works in the negative direction, as we will discuss later, is called the horn effect.

In the Classroom

In the classroom, teachers are prone to the halo effect error when evaluating their students. For example, a teacher might assume that a well-behaved student is also bright and motivated before they have objectively evaluated the student’s capacity in these areas.

A research study conducted in 1968 by Rosenthal and Jacobson discovered that teachers generally develop expectations for their students based not merely on the school record but also on their physical appearance.

In the experiment, the teachers were provided with objective information, such as a child’s academic potential along with a photo of an attractive or unattractive girl or boy. The results indicated that the teachers’ expectations concerning the child’s academic future were significantly associated with the child’s attractiveness.

Another more recent study compared the influence of attractiveness on grading in university courses wherein the instructors either could or could not observe the appearance of their students (Hernandez-Julian & Peters, 2017).

The results indicated that appearance could impact grading in traditional classrooms; the students whose attractiveness was rated as above average procured significantly lower grades in online classes wherein the instructors could not observe the appearance of the students.

In the Workplace

A study by Parrett (2015) examined the impact of beauty on earnings based on the tipping data of restaurants in Virginia. He discovered that more attractive servers earned in tips nearly $1261 more annually than their unattractive counterparts.

The primary explanation stemmed from female customers’ tipping the better-looking females more than they did the unattractive females. The customer taste-based discrimination herein mattered more for females than for males.

Moreover, an investigation into educational attainment and self-evaluations as mediating mechanisms for the impact of attractiveness and intelligence on the financial strain and income seemed to indicate that physical attractiveness could directly and indirectly impact income (Judge, Hurst & Simon, 2009).

Academics and Intelligence

A study conducted by Landy and Sigall (1974) demonstrated the impact of the halo effect on male judgments of female academic competence. In their experiment, 60 male undergraduate students were asked to evaluate an essay supposedly written by a first-year female college student.

The male undergraduates had to assess the quality of the prose and the competence of the writer on a number of dimensions. The essays included both poorly written samples and well-written versions.

Of the 60 male participants, 20 were given a photo of an unattractive female as an author, another 20 were given a photo of an attractive female as the author, and the final 20 were provided with no photos.

Moreover, while 30 of the participants read the well-written version, the other 30 read the poorly-written sample. The results showed that the participants had evaluated the writer least favorably when she was unattractive and most favorably when she was attractive.

Furthermore, the effect of the writer’s attractiveness on the assessment of her writing was most salient when the objective quality of the essay was poor.

These results seemed to imply that the male readers were more inclined to tolerate poor performance by attractive females than by unattractive females.

A more recent study examined residual cues to intelligence in male and female faces while also seeking to control for attractiveness associated with the halo effect (Moore, Filippou & Perrett, 2011).

Out of over 300 photos of British college students, pictures of high-intelligence composite faces were created from the photos rated the highest in perceived intelligence, and pictures of low-intelligence composite from the photos rated the lowest in perceived intelligence.

Then each group of photos was further divided into male and female faces. The participants of the study, which comprised 92 males and 164 females, were to rate the composite faces for attractiveness and intelligence.

For the male composites, the high-perceived intelligence group was rated as notably more attractive than their low-perceived intelligence counterparts.

Moreover, the attractive male faces were also perceived to be friendlier and funnier by women as well as men. The results seemed to indicate that intelligence might be a crucial component of attractiveness in male faces.

On Sentencing for Crimes

A study by Michael G. Efran which examined the effects of physical attractiveness on the judgment of culpability and the severity of the sentences recommended for criminals, discovered that attractive criminals were likely to receive more lenient penalties than unattractive ones for the same crime (Efran, 1974).

According to the study, the societal perception which holds that more attractive individuals have better prospects for the future than less attractive individuals supposedly accounted for this discrepancy.

However, another study on the same topic by Sigall and Ostrove demonstrated more nuanced evidence (Sigall & Ostrove, 1975).

The experiment evaluated a hypothetical burglary and a hypothetical swindle. While the former involved a woman unlawfully procuring a key and embezzling $2200, the latter involved a woman inveigling a man to invest $2200 in a corporation that did not exist.

In the burglary (unrelated to the criminal’s attractiveness), the attractive defendant received a more lenient sentence than the unattractive one. However, in the swindle (wherein the crime was connected to the criminal’s attractiveness), the attractive defendant received the more severe sentence.

The results seemed to suggest that the customary leniency given to the more attractive criminal was reversed or negated when the nature of the offense involved the criminal’s attractiveness.

The American psychologist Frederick L. Wells (1907) first identified the halo effect in a study of ratings of the literary merit of authors.

However, it was Edward Thorndike who first recognized it with empirical evidence. Thorndike was an early behaviorist who delved into the psychology of learning. He officially introduced the term ‘the halo error’ in 1920 in his article, “A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings”.

Thorndike described the halo effect as the cognitive bias whereby one aspect of a person shapes one’s opinions of the other dimensions and features of that person. Although Thorndike initially employed the term only to refer to people, subsequently, its use has been expanded even to the spheres of marketing.

In A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings , Thorndike (1920) sought to pin down this cognitive bias via replication.

In the experiment for the study, he would ask two commanding officers in the military to assess their soldiers based on their intellect, physical qualities (such as voice, physique, energy, neatness, and bearing), leadership skills , and personal qualities (such as loyalty, selflessness, cooperation, and dependability).

The bias that he thought characterized the ratings was confirmed. Thorndike discovered that a person’s attractiveness significantly influenced how that person’s other attributes were assessed.

His study demonstrated notable correlations; the correlation for physique with character was .28, for physique with intelligence was .31, and for physique with leadership was .39.

The ratings were seemingly impacted by a marked tendency to view a person in general as either good or bad and then jump to conclusions concerning other qualities of that person. These conclusions were based on the initial impression of or the general feeling concerning the relevant individuals.

For instance, the ratings on one special attribute of an officer would often begin a trend in the ratings in the direction of the perceived special attribute; a positive trait would engender a positive trend, and a negative trait a negative trend.

The final results for a particular soldier would invariably correlate with the rest of the results regardless of whether the special attribute was positive or negative.

Halo Effect Experiment

One classic experiment that demonstrates the halo effect in psychology is the study conducted by Solomon Asch in 1946. In the experiment, participants were shown a series of photographs of individuals and asked to rate them on various personality traits.

The catch was that the participants were shown either an attractive or unattractive photograph of the same person, randomly assigned.

The results revealed a clear halo effect. Participants consistently rated the individuals in the attractive photographs as having more positive personality traits than those in the unattractive photographs.

They attributed qualities such as intelligence, kindness, and social skills to attractive individuals while assigning less favorable traits to the unattractive ones.

This experiment demonstrated how the initial impression of physical attractiveness influenced participants’ perception of other unrelated qualities, illustrating the presence and impact of the halo effect in shaping our judgments and evaluations of others.

The Reverse Halo Effect

The reverse halo effect refers to the phenomenon whereby positive perceptions of a person can yield negative consequences (Edward, 2004).

The reverse halo effect, also known as the horns effect, is a cognitive bias where a negative overall impression of a person influences the perception of their specific traits or abilities. It is the opposite of the halo effect, where a positive impression leads to positive perceptions.

In the reverse halo effect, negative traits or shortcomings of an individual can overshadow their positive qualities, leading to biased judgments and evaluations.

For instance, the horn effect may cause us to stereotype that someone who is physically overweight is also lazy, although there is no evidence to indicate that morality is tied to appearance.

An experiment conducted by Joseph Forgas on 246 individuals bears this out. Following recalling happy or sad past events, the participants were required to read a philosophical essay with an image of either a young female or an old male attached as the writer.

The results showed that those who had recalled sad events and were, therefore, in a negative mood rated lower for the young female. A negative effect seemed to have eliminated or reversed the halo effect.

Furthermore, research also shows that both females and males who are more attractive are likely to be more vane and egotistical (Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani & Longo, 1991).

Moreover, as noted above concerning the study of Sigall and Ostrove, individuals who commit crimes using their good looks to their advantage are more likely to receive harsher penalties than unattractive criminals (Sigall & Ostrove, 1975).

Key Takeaways 

• The halo effect also called the halo error, is a type of cognitive bias whereby our perception of someone is positively influenced by our opinions of that person’s other related traits.
• In his article, A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings, American psychologist Edward Thorndike first recognized the halo effect with empirical evidence in 1920.
• The halo effect can shape our perception of others’ intelligence and competence, and its influence can be seen in many settings, from the classroom to the courthouse.
• An example of the halo effect is the attractiveness stereotype, which refers to the tendency to assign positive qualities and traits to physically attractive people. People often judge attractive individuals for higher morality, better mental health, and greater intelligence. This cognitive error in judgment reflects one’s individual prejudices, ideology, and social perception.
• The reverse halo effect is the phenomenon whereby positive perceptions of a person can yield negative consequences.
• The horn effect, closely tied to the halo effect, is the cognitive bias whereby a single negative trait unduly shapes one’s opinion of another.

What is the halo effect?

The halo effect refers to the cognitive bias where positive attributes or qualities in one aspect of a person (such as physical attractiveness) influence the perception of their other traits (such as intelligence or kindness), even without evidence supporting those assumptions.

What is the halo effect in organizational behavior?

The halo effect bias can influence how individuals are perceived and evaluated in the workplace, leading to unfair judgments and decisions. The halo effect can impact various aspects of organizational behavior, including performance appraisals, hiring decisions, and promotions.

What is the difference between stereotype and halo effect?

The main difference between stereotype and halo effect is the scope of application. Stereotype refers to a general perception or belief about a group of people based on their shared characteristics.

It is a broad generalization that may not apply to every individual within the group. On the other hand, halo effect is a cognitive bias that affects the perception of individuals, focusing on one positive or negative characteristic to form an overall impression, regardless of their group membership.

Asch, S. E. (1946). Forming impressions of personality.  The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology ,  41 (3), 258.

Burns, M., & Griffith, A. (2018). The Learning Imperative: Raising performance in organisations by improving learning . Crown House Publishing Ltd.

Clifford, M. M., & Walster, E. (1973). The effect of physical attractiveness on teacher expectations . Sociology of education , 248-258.

Eagly, A. H., Ashmore, R. D., Makhijani, M. G., & Longo, L. C. (1991). What is beautiful is good, but…: A meta-analytic review of research on the physical attractiveness stereotype . Psychological bulletin, 110 (1), 109.

Efran, M. G. (1974). The effect of physical appearance on the judgment of guilt, interpersonal attraction, and severity of recommended punishment in a simulated jury task. Journal of Research in Personality, 8 (1), 45-54.

Ellis, G. (Ed.). (2018). Cognitive Biases in Visualizations . New York, NY, USA: Springer.

Hernández-Julián, R., & Peters, C. (2017). Student appearance and academic performance . Journal of Human Capital, 11 (2), 247-262.

Judge, T. A., Hurst, C., & Simon, L. S. (2009). Does it pay to be smart, attractive, or confident (or all three)? Relationships among general mental ability, physical attractiveness, core self-evaluations, and income . Journal of Applied Psychology, 94 (3), 742.

Landy, D., & Sigall, H. (1974). Beauty is talent: Task evaluation as a function of the performer’s physical attractiveness . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 29(3), 299.

Moore, F. R., Filippou, D., & Perrett, D. I. (2011). Intelligence and attractiveness in the face: Beyond the attractiveness halo effect. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 9 (3), 205-217.

Parrett, M. (2015). Beauty and the feast: Examining the effect of beauty on earnings using restaurant tipping data . Journal of Economic Psychology, 49 , 34-46.

Ries, A. (2006). Understanding marketing psychology and the halo effect. Advertising Age , 17.

Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom . The Urban Review, 3 (1), 16-20.

Sigall, H., & Ostrove, N. (1975). Beautiful but dangerous: effects of offender attractiveness and nature of the crime on juridic judgment . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31 (3), 410.

Thorndike, E. L. (1920). A constant error in psychological ratings. Journal of applied psychology, 4 (1), 25-29.

Wells, F. L. (1907). A Statistical Study of Literary Merit . (Columbia Univ. Cont. to Phil. & Psych., 16, 3.). Archives of Psychology .

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halo effect

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• University of Michigan Library - Deep Blue Repositories - The Halo Effect: Evidence for Unconscious Alteration of Judgments
• Simply Psychology - Why the Halo Effect Affects How We Perceive Others
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• National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - An Analysis of the Generalizability and Stability of the Halo Effect During the COVID-19 Pandemic Outbreak
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• Rutgers University - Department of Phulosophy - She just doesn’t look like a philosopher. . .? Affective influences on the halo effect in impression formation
• Frontiers - An Analysis of the Generalizability and Stability of the Halo Effect During the COVID-19 Pandemic Outbreak
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• Verywell Mind - Why the Halo Affects How We Perceive Others

halo effect , error in reasoning in which an impression formed from a single trait or characteristic is allowed to influence multiple judgments or ratings of unrelated factors.

Research on the phenomenon of the halo effect was pioneered by American psychologist Edward L. Thorndike , who in 1920 reported the existence of the effect in servicemen following experiments in which commanding officers were asked to rate their subordinates on intelligence, physique, leadership, and character, without having spoken to the subordinates. Thorndike noted a correlation between unrelated positive and negative traits. The service members who were found to be taller and more attractive were also rated as more intelligent and as better soldiers. Thorndike determined from this experiment that people generalize from one outstanding trait to form a favourable view of a person’s whole personality.

In 1946, Polish-born psychologist Solomon Asch found that the way in which individuals form impressions of one another involved a primacy effect, derived from early or initial information. First impressions were established as more important than subsequent impressions in forming an overall impression of someone. Participants in the experiment were read two lists of adjectives that described a person. The adjectives on the lists were the same but the order was reversed; the first list had adjectives that went from positive to negative, while the second list presented the adjectives from negative to positive. How the participant rated the person depended on the order in which the adjectives were read. Adjectives presented first had more influence on the rating than adjectives presented later. When positive traits were presented first, the participants rated the person more favourably; when the order was changed to introduce the negative traits first, the same person was rated less favourably.

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An Analysis of the Generalizability and Stability of the Halo Effect During the COVID-19 Pandemic Outbreak

Giulio gabrieli.

1 Psychology Program, School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

Peipei Setoh

Gianluca esposito.

2 LKC School of Medicine, School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

3 Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

Associated Data

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found at: https://doi.org/10.21979/N9/5IIVOM .

The influence on the global evaluation of a person based on the perception of a single trait is a phenomenon widely investigated in social psychology. Widely regarded as Halo effect , this phenomenon has been studied for more than 100 years now, and findings such as the relationship between aesthetic perception and other personality traits—such as competence and trustworthiness—have since been uncovered. Trustworthiness plays an especially crucial role in individuals' social interactions. Despite the large body of literature published on the Halo effect, and especially on the relationship between aesthetic appearance and perceived trustworthiness, little is known about the overall generalizability of the effect, as almost all of the studies have been conducted on adult participants from Western countries. Moreover, little is known about the stability of the effect over time, in the event of major destabilization, such as the outbreak of a pandemic. In this work, the cross-cultural generalizability of the Halo effect is investigated before and during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic. An analysis of the generalizability and stability over time of the Halo effect is presented. Participants ( N = 380, N = 145 Asians, N = 235 Caucasians) have been asked to rate the aesthetic appearance and perceived trustworthiness of a set of human faces of different ages, gender, and ethnicity. Result of our analysis demonstrated that the Halo effect (Aesthetic × trustworthiness) is influenced by the age of presented faces, but not by their gender or ethnicity. Moreover, our results show that the strength of the effect can be affected by external events and that the volatility is higher for adults' than children's faces.

1. Introduction

The Halo effect (HE) is a cognitive bias in impression formation whereby the general evaluation of individuals' attributes is based on the evaluation of a single attribute (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977 ). When applied to aesthetic appearance, the HE is observed when the physical appearance is used as a basis for the evaluations of other attributes that are unrelated to appearance whatsoever. For example, a stranger who looks good is also perceived as intelligent or smart, even though intelligence and smarts are unrelated to physical attractiveness (Todorov et al., 2009 ). As a subclass of the confirmation bias in impression formation (Nickerson, 1998 ), the HE is known to be intuitive, pervasive, and constant (Cooper, 1981 ; Feldman, 1986 ; Kozlowski et al., 1986 ; Feeley, 2002 ). The HE is a widely investigated psychological phenomena, with an impact on different academic fields such as social psychology, computer science, and empirical aesthetics (Hartmann et al., 2008 ; Todorov et al., 2009 ; Tuch et al., 2012 ; Ferrari et al., 2017 ).

1.1. Aesthetics and Trustworthiness

The term “Halo Effect” was first proposed by Thorndike ( 1920 ) to describe the radiating effects of a single attribute on the evaluations of other attributes. The term resonates with paintings from the medieval period, in which saints were often crowned with a glowing circle around their heads, representing their general reverence or goodness. Empirically, the HE has been observed in numerous domains of impression formation. Early demonstrations of the effect (e.g., Asch, 1946 ), for instance, have shown that central attributes, such as social warmth or physical appearance, have predictable and radiating effects on the inferences of other attributes. Compared to an unattractive person, an attractive person is often assumed to be happier, more competent at work, more successful in marriage, even though none of these inferences are supported by evidence (Dion et al., 1972 ). Consistent with this work, other studies have demonstrated the HE of physical appearance in a host of social domains, from intellect (Landy and Sigall, 1974 ) and personality (Little et al., 2006 ) all the way to moral deservingness (Dion, 1972 ; Forgas et al., 1983 ), integrity (Dion, 1972 ), and many more (see Eagly et al., 1991 , for a review).

Together, these results cast light on the associative nature of impression formation. That is, inferences about others are generally guided by the implicit rule that whatever good (e.g., beautiful) goes with the good (e.g., generous), and whatever bad (e.g., unattractive) goes with the bad (e.g., unintelligent). Such a rule, compatible with the Gestalt principle of coherence (Thagard, 2000 ), is regarded as a cognitive explanation for the HE. In the next paragraphs, we focus on how appearance may affect the perception of trustworthiness.

The impact of aesthetic appearance on perceived trustworthiness, also known as HE aesthetics × trustworthiness (Todorov et al., 2009 ), has been studied since the early years of the twentieth century. Unlike aesthetic appearance, trustworthiness is a global or “umbrella” trait that is fundamental to social perception (Fiske et al., 2007 ), with diverse implications in numerous life domains, such as in assessing another person's good or ill intentions.

Other works have replicated the impact of aesthetic appearance on perceived trustworthiness, with more aesthetically/physically attractive individuals being perceived as more trustworthy. For example, in a study conducted by Carter ( 1978 ) on the appearance of counselors—a replication of a previous study conducted by Cash et al. ( 1975 )—revealed that attractive counselors are also perceived as more intelligent, warm, competent, and trustworthy. The strength of the effect was further confirmed in a review (Eagly et al., 1991 ) where aesthetic attractiveness was found to be positively linked with perceived social competence across 76 studies.

1.2. But Is Attractive Always Trustworthy?

Despite the large body of literature on the relationship between aesthetic appearance and trustworthiness, several questions remain unanswered. Almost all of the available literature focused, in fact, on adult individuals sampled from the WEIRD population, rendering generalizability an issue (Henrich et al., 2010 ; Jones, 2010 ). Moreover, even though some studies have been conducted on children's faces, demonstrating that the effect exists in children (Dion et al., 1972 ), there are limited comparisons on the impact of adults vs. children targets. As children's faces are known to be special stimuli that automatically capture adults' visual attention and elicit parental care (Brosch et al., 2007 ; Proverbio and De Gabriele, 2019 ; Venturoso et al., 2019 ), the HE may be present with different strengths between adult and child faces. Not only children's faces, but also adults' faces with facial traits that resemble the stereotypical traits of children, such as big round eyes, have been shown to influence adult viewers' estimations such that baby-faced adults are perceived as more trustworthy, warm, and innocent (see Zebrowitz, 1997 , for a review). Moreover, repeated exposure to the same face has been reported to influence viewers' judgments of others' traits and skills, such as in the judgment of politicians' competence (Zajonc, 2001 ; Verhulst et al., 2010 ).

Finally, controversial results have been found for what concerns the importance of the rated individuals' gender. Significant differences between the scores given to males and females have been found in the works of Carter ( 1978 ), but not in others (Wetzel et al., 1981 ). One possibility for this is that in Carter ( 1978 ), there was an additional stereotype playing a part in the interaction participant gender × counselor gender), which is in people's mental representation of the stereotypical counselor (Chambers, 1983 ). To overcome the limitations of previous studies, this study aims to verify how the (a) ethnicity (ingroup vs. outgroup), (b) age (adult vs. baby), (c) gender (male vs. female), and (d) aesthetic attractiveness combine in shaping trust perception. More specifically, in this work, we investigate the aesthetics and trustworthiness perception of Asians and White/Caucasians adults raters of both adults' and children's faces, both males and females, of Asians and Caucasians ethnicities.

The data collection stage of the project, with the methods described in section 2.2, started in August 2019 and continued through April 2020. The data collection phase overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. Serendipitously, the data collected for this project allowed us to investigate the stability of the HE over time over time. One additional hypothesis—H 2 —was therefore added to study such effects.

1.3. Aim and Hypothesis

We formulated two hypotheses. The first hypothesis, analytic plan, and method were pre-registered on the Open Science Framework; the second hypothesis was formulated after beginning the data collection. The complete analytic plan is reported in section 2.3.

H 1 : “ Aesthetic attractiveness is positively correlated with perceived trust (HE). We predict the age of presented face to have an effect on the strength of the relationship, with the strength of the correlation higher for adults than for children's targets, but not the ethnicity or the gender of presented face.”

Rationale : Children's faces elicit parental care regardless of kinship and hence, capture greater attention compared to adults faces (Brosch et al., 2007 ; Glocker et al., 2009 ; Parsons et al., 2011 ; Venturoso et al., 2019 ). Additionally, a recent study conducted by Collova et al. ( 2019 )—based on a two-dimensional model (trustworthiness and dominance) from Oosterhof and Todorov ( 2008 )—investigated whether children's faces elicit the same signal threat responses to adults' faces. Results of Collova's studies revealed that adults rate children's faces on different dimensions to adults' faces. More specifically, when rating children's faces, the evaluation is not based on trustworthiness. This suggests that evaluation of children's faces are not judged on their perception of trustworthiness, regardless of how aesthetically attractive they are. If so, one should expect the relationship between aesthetic appearance and trustworthiness to be stronger for adults' ratings of adults' faces as compared to children's faces. Therefore, we can expect the relationship between aesthetic appearance and trustworthiness to be stronger for adults' ratings of adults', as compared to adults' ratings of children's faces. From prior work, we know that gender (Wetzel et al., 1981 ) and ethnicity (Xu et al., 2012 ) do not seem to moderate the HE. But for the sake of completion, we decided to investigate these two demographic variables, with the expectation that neither gender nor ethnicity will have a significant impact on our observed results. In line with previous studies, we do not expect to find a significant impact of gender on the strength of the effect. With regard to ethnicity, differences may be present in the aesthetic ratings given to individuals of the ingroup or of the outgroup. However, as the implicit judgment of trustworthiness is based on the elaboration of facial cues that occur faster than the elaboration of ethnicity-specific traits (e.g., shape of the eyes; Engell et al., 2007 ), we do not expect any differences between the strength of the effect for ingroup and outgroup are expected.

H 2 : “ When individuals are asked to rate the aesthetic and trustworthiness of others' faces, we expect to see changes in the variability of the ratings after the diffusion of news about COVID-19 in trustworthiness but not aesthetic judgments toward adults but not children's faces.”

Rationale : Research has established that Asian and Caucasian faces are perceived as distinct categories (Zhou et al., 2020 ). In a study conducted by Xu et al. ( 2012 ), it was reported that when making inferences about the trustworthiness of others from their aesthetic appearance, Chinese and Caucasians adopt the same strategies. However, Koopmans and Veit ( 2014 ) found that negative inter-ethnic contact can cause reduced trust toward members of the outgroup. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic global threat, following the diffusion of news about the spreading of the novel coronavirus in China, and with politicians targeting a specific ethnic group (Zheng et al., 2020 ), we can expect the situation to bias non-Asians against Asians, hence reducing Caucasians' estimation of trustworthiness, but not of aesthetics, toward Asian adults' faces. Previous research work by Fincher et al. ( 2008 ) highlighted that regions with a stronger history of contagious diseases are more likely to adopt collectivistic behaviors, including outgroup hostilities. It is therefore possible that, with the subsequent outbreak in Western countries, together with the adoption of specific measures to counter the diffusion of the virus in Eastern countries, collectivist beliefs brought about a reduction in the perceived trustworthiness, but not aesthetics, of Caucasians as evaluated by Asians. Such findings will suggest that salient threats of contagion, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, may elicit the tendency to prefer interactions with familiar ingroups and reject unfamiliar outgroups. This tendency, given its strong evolutionary undertone, should be present in most people regardless of their culture. Account for this assumption, one should expect a global reduction of trust in the perception of adult faces, regardless of the cultural backgrounds of these adult faces. Such global reduction, however, should not be observed in the aesthetic perception, which unassociated with the threat of contagion. Taken together, these hypotheses suggest that we should see a generalized reduction of trust, but not aesthetics, toward both Asians and Caucasians adults' faces. For evaluation of children's faces, a different situation is expected. In an event-related potential (ERP) study conducted by Proverbio and De Gabriele ( 2019 ), it is reported that the other-race effect does not apply to infants' faces, supporting the specificity of the age of a face over its ethnicity for young faces. Differences in adults' perception of adults' and children's faces in other-race effects studies were also reported by Kuefner et al. ( 2008 ), in a series of three experimental studies. These findings suggest that the salience of infants' and children's faces should limit the impact of race on the estimation of other traits. Building on the work from Collova et al. ( 2019 ) reported above (H 1 ), we can expect an early evaluation of infants' faces not to have an influence on perceived trustworthiness. Taken together, findings on the specificity of infants' and children's faces suggest that the age dimension plays a prominent role, more than the possible perceived threat dimension, in the evaluation of children's faces. It is therefore possible that, when presented with faces of children, adults' trustworthiness judgments are less likely to be influenced by the aesthetic traits of a child's face, as compared to when they are rating an adult's face. From a biological point of view, this behavior would reflect mammals', and especially humans', altruistic responses toward infants (Preston, 2013 ). Consequently, we do not expect any difference in the judgment of both the aesthetic and trustworthiness of children's faces before and during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak.

2.1. Participants

The study was approved by the Internal Review Board of Nanyang Technological University (PSY-IRB-2019-008 and IRB-2019-10-019) and conducted according to the declaration of Helsinki. Informed consent was obtained from all the participants before the study. Participants ( N = 380, M age = 25.0±8.49) voluntarily participated and were recruited through the Nanyang Technological University's School of Social Sciences Research Participation System or online through different social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and the Subreddit community “samplesize,” with no geographical constraints. These social media and communities were selected in order to ensure our Caucasian sample would be composed of participants from different geographical areas, and especially North America and Europe. The gender and ethnicity of participants are reported in Table 1 .

Participants' demographic information.

2.2. Study Design

2.2.1. stimuli.

Participants were presented with 64 faces of two different age groups (32 adults, 32 children), genders (32 males, females), and ethnicities (Asians, Caucasians). This structure allowed for the presentation of eight faces per combination of age, gender, and ethnicity (e.g., 8 adult Asian male faces). Front-facing images of faces ( N = 64) were selected from the FFHQ Dataset (Karras et al., 2019 ), a dataset containing 70,000 high-quality (1,024 × 1,024) images published on Flickr2, an online photo management, and sharing tool, under different creative commons and public domain licenses (Creative Commons BY 2.0, Creative Commons BY-NC 2.0, Public Domain Mark 1.0, Public Domain CC0 1.0, or U.S. Government Works license). The dataset itself is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license by NVIDIA Corporation and has been successfully used in previous publications (Karras et al., 2019 ; Kynkäänniemi et al., 2019 ; Wang et al., 2019 ; Zhao et al., 2020 ). Stimuli selection was conducted in such a way to create groups of eight ( N = 8) faces for each possible combination of age, gender, and ethnicity. While values of aesthetics pleasantness were not available in the source dataset, images were selected with the aim to cover all the possible spectrum of values for aesthetics for each combination of age, gender, and ethnicity. More specifically, for each combination, four ( N = 4) images were selected among those we expected would have obtained low (<50) values of aesthetics, and four ( N = 4) we expected would have been rated high (>50) in aesthetics. The manipulation successfully worked, as values that covered the whole spectrum of possible ratings were obtained, and enough variance was achieved for the set of faces in both aesthetics and trustworthiness ratings, of which we expected four images to receive lower ratings in aesthetics and four to receive higher ratings in aesthetics. Selected faces were presented in random order, with no time constraints.

2.2.2. Procedure

After having signed the informed consent, participants were instructed about the scope and procedure of the experiment, as well as the taxonomy employed in the study. Participants rated each face for aesthetic pleasantness (“ How much do you like this person?” ) and trustworthiness (“ How much do you trust this person?” ) on a 100-point sliding scale, anchored from 1 being “not at all” not to 100 = “extremely.” The effectiveness of the first question at measuring aesthetic pleasantness has been verified comparing our results with previous works that focused on the relationship between liking and trustworthiness. More details are reported in section 4.

2.3. Analytic Plan

The analytic plan was pre-registered on the Open Science Framework. Additional information can be found online on the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/5cge3 ). A power analysis was conducted to estimate the number of participants required for this study (H 1 ). Given that previous works have found the effect size for the HE of human faces to be of medium strength, to take into account a possible bias in published works (Collaboration, 2015 ; Camerer et al., 2018 ), we assumed a very weak effect size to estimate the required number of participants. Assuming six groups (children/adult, male/female, Asian/Caucasian), a very weak effect size (Cohen's d = 0.1), and to achieve a power of 0.95 at a 0.05 alpha value, a power analysis conducted in G*Power (Faul et al., 2007 , 2009 ) revealed that N = 330 participants are required to perform an analysis of variance. The strength of the HE is measured as the Pearson's correlation between aesthetic and trustworthiness ratings. To test H 1 , a 2 × 2 × 2 analysis of variance was employed to control for the existence of significant effects of gender, age, and ethnicity on the strength of the HE, measured as the Persons' correlation between aesthetics and trustworthiness judgments. A z -test is employed as a post-hoc test to test whether the HE is stronger for adults than children faces. Additionally, a confirmatory analysis is conducted by means of a multiple linear regression analysis.

For what concerns the second hypothesis (H 2 ), four Levene's tests for equality of variance have been conducted on aesthetics and trustworthiness, comparing the variance of data collected before and after the diffusion of news about the novel coronavirus, once for adults' faces and one for children's faces. As a threshold, we used February 1, 2020, which is, according to Google Trend 2, the moment in which people started to show interest toward the SARS-CoV-2. In order for H 2 to be verified, we expected significant differences in the variance of trustworthiness ratings toward adults' faces before and after our threshold date, but not for adults' faces aesthetics ratings, nor for both aesthetics and trustworthiness ratings toward children's faces. To take into account the multiple numbers of tests conducted, a correction for multiple tests using the Benjamini–Hochberg procedure, with a false discovery rate of 0.10, is employed.

3.1. Effect of Ethnicity, Age, and Gender on the Strength of the Halo Effect

To evaluate the effects of ethnicity, age, and gender on the strength of the HE, measured as the Pearson's correlation between aesthetics (mean = 55.97 ± 19.81) and trustworthiness (mean = 53.83 ± 21.82), an analysis of variance has been conducted. Results of the analysis of variance revealed only a main effect of age ( F -value = 9.753, p -value = 0.00194, η p 2 =0.03, Effect size f = 0.18, correlation among repeated measures = 0.503, achieved power = 1.0) but no main effect of gender or ethnicity, as well as no significant effects of the interaction between age and gender, or gender and ethnicity on the strength of the HE (aesthetics × trustworthiness). A significant interaction between face's age and ethnicity (ingroup vs. outgroup) is highlighted ( F -value = 6.31, p -value = 0.0124), such that the differences in strength of the HE between Ingroup's Adults and Children faces ( t -value = 3.98, uncorrected p -value= 7.11 · 10 -5 ) are bigger than the differences between Outgroup's Adults and Children faces ( t -value = 1.22, uncorrected p -value = 0.221). This may however be caused by the diffusion of news about the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. In fact, by repeating the analysis only on a subset of data collected before the initial diffusion of information about the novel coronavirus ( N = 179), the interaction between ethnicity (ingroup or outgroup) and age of presented faces is not significant ( F -value = 2.465, uncorrected p -value = 0.118).

These results suggest that the strength of the relationship between aesthetics and trustworthiness (Pearson's r = 0.676, p = < 0.001) are influenced by the age of presented faces, which is whether it is a child or an adult face but not by its gender or ethnicity. Taken together, the findings suggest that, at a general level, when adult raters make inferences about others' aesthetic and trustworthiness, they do not rate people of different gender or ethnicity differently, but they adopt different strategies for adults and children.

More specifically, the strength of the relationship between aesthetics and trustworthiness is significantly higher ( z -test t = 3.626, p -value = 0.000287, Figures 1 , ​ ,2) 2 ) for adult (M = 0.53±0.41) than for children faces (M = 0.47±0.46). These results indicate that adults are more likely to estimate the trustworthiness of other adults from their aesthetic appearance, while the estimation is less consistent when it comes to predicting the trustworthiness of children from their appearance.

Strength of the halo effect ( pearson-r ) by age.

Distribution of aesthetics and trustworthiness judgments by age.

Additionally, the strength of the relationship between the two variables has been further confirmed using a multiple linear regression analysis, with the formula reported in Equation (1). Results are reported in Table 2 .

Results of the multiple linear regression used to investigate the strength of the HE and the influence of age, gender, ethnicity, and aesthetic on trustworthiness.

A subsequent exploratory analysis revealed that the effect is significantly stronger for Asian participants, as compared to Caucasian participants ( t = 13.2, uncorrected p -value = 9.68·10 -39 ). Further exploring the difference between Asian and Caucasian participants, both groups showed no significant differences in the HE elicited by younger faces of their same ingroup and outgroup (Asian participants: t = −0.67, uncorrected p -value = 0.503; Caucasian participants: t = −0.935, uncorrected p -value = 0.351). Focusing on the behavior of a single ethnic group (e.g., Asians participants), no differences have been found on the correlation of aesthetics and trustworthiness ratings of Asian (ingroup) and Caucasian (outgroup) faces ( t = −1.551, uncorrected p -value = 0.122). On the other hand, the strength of the HE —measured as the correlation between aesthetics and trustworthiness ratings—is significantly higher for ingroup (Caucasian) as compared to outgroup (Asian) faces ( t = 4.026, uncorrected p -value = 6.697 ·10 -05 ).

3.2. Association of SARS-CoV-2 on the Strength of the Halo Effect Over Time

Four ( N = 4) Levene's tests for equality of variance have been employed to compare the variance of data (aesthetics and trustworthiness) collected before and after the initial diffusion of news about the novel coronavirus (H 2 ). The Benjamini–Hochberg procedure, with a false discovery rate of 0.10, is employed to take into account the number of performed tests. Results of the comparison between the variability in aesthetics and trustworthiness judgments toward both adults' and children's faces are reported in Table 3 . Results ( q -values) highlight significant changes in the variability of trustworthiness ratings toward adults' faces before and after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, but not in aesthetics ratings given to adults' faces, nor to aesthetics or trustworthiness ratings given to children's faces.

Results of Levene's test of variance for aesthetics and trustworthiness judgments toward adults' and children' faces ( q -values are evaluated using the Benjamini–Hochberg procedure at a 0.10 false discovery rate).

4. Discussion

Based on previous works within the field of the HE , we hypothesized that the impact of perceived aesthetic on trustworthiness judgments would depend on the age of presented faces, but not on their gender or ethnicity (H 1 ). Results of the analysis of variance show the main effect of the age of presented faces but not of gender or ethnicity, nor of any interaction effect between gender and ethnicity, confirming H 1 . Moreover, our post-hoc z -test confirmed that the relationship between aesthetics and trustworthiness is stronger for adults' as compared to children's faces. In light of the results here presented, our analysis supports the specificity of children's faces. In fact, only the age of the presented faces but not the gender or age influenced the strength of the HE in our sample, measured as the Pearson correlation between individuals' aesthetic appearance and perceived trustworthiness. As reported in previous works on the Baby Schema effect (Venturoso et al., 2019 ), younger faces elicit specific responses in adult viewers. A possible explanation for this may be drawn from the evolutionary perspective. In fact, the cure of the offspring plays a central role in the survival of the species, and therefore adult individuals may be more prone to trust a younger individual even though the perceived aesthetic appearance is low. On the other hand, when looking at adult faces, the evaluation of someone's trustworthiness is largely based on made on the basis of the appearance.

Our exploratory analysis further confirmed the specificity of children's faces. In fact, both Caucasian and Asian participants revealed no significant differences in the strength of the HE when exposed to either children of their same ingroup or of their outgroup. While the same can be said for Asian adults looking at Asian and Caucasian adult faces, this does not hold true for for the Caucasians in our pool of participants, who indeed showed significant differences in the strength of the HE when exposed to faces of other Caucasians (higher Halo) as compared to adult Asians (lower Halo). This confirms previously published results on both the specificity of children faces, and significant differences in adults' physiological activation (Esposito et al., 2014 ). While this goes beyond the initial plan of this work and has been in fact not treated as hypothesis confirmation but as exploratory analysis, the general findings here reported about the HE are in line with previous works that investigated cross-cultural differences across Asians and Caucasians with different methodologies. Future work should investigate significant differences between the strength of the Halo in Asian and Caucasian participants by properly defining one or more hypotheses and by recruiting an adequate number of participants to verify novel hypotheses with adequate power.

On the subject of the stability of the HE over time (H 2 ), the analysis of the variance of data collected before and after the diffusion of news about the novel coronavirus (section 3.2), revealed that adults' faces trustworthiness ratings, but not aesthetics ratings, significantly differ in the data collected before and after the diffusion of news about the novel coronavirus. Differently, no changes are found in the aesthetics and trustworthiness judgments of children's faces. These results are in line with our predictions on the specificity of children's faces. While our results confirm the possibility of modulating the strength of the HE, the current dataset does not allow the study of the qualitative impact of an external event, nor we can claim that changes in the stability are caused exclusively by the current pandemic and public policies. Future studies should address this problem by empirically presenting the external events, using a priming procedure, and measuring the impact over time with a longitudinal and experimental approach.

Despite the strength of the results here presented, there are several limitations worth highlighting. As mentioned earlier, the data collection stage started before and continued during the novel coronavirus pandemic outbreak. To reiterate, significant differences were found in the trustworthiness ratings given to adults faces before and during the pandemic outbreak. Therefore, while our first hypothesis (H 1 ) has been empirically verified accordingly to our preregistered plan, we cannot rule out the possibility that the overall world's situation played an indeterminate role in shaping our results, nor that events other than the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak influenced our results. Future works should investigate the stability of the effect under a controlled condition, such as by using a prime. Moreover, while we targeted Asian and Caucasian participants, we have not investigated the influence of participants' ethnicity at a more specific level (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). Future studies should focus on a single ethnic group to verify the consistency and generalizability of the results here presented. Additionally, while participants were informed of the scope of the experiment, including the fact that we were specifically interested in aesthetic appearance, participants whose first language is not English may not have a specific counterpart for this concept. Future works should investigate participants' behavior using questions posed in their native language. An additional note has to be placed on the terminology employed in this study. A possible critique is that the experimental setup does not allow to measure aesthetic pleasantness, but liking. While this is a valid critique, participants were informed of the scope of the experiment before enrolling and at the beginning of the experiment. Moreover, our results differ significantly from other works that investigate the relationship between liking and trustworthiness using a similar paradigm [e.g., Todorov et al., 2009 , comparison with Study 3 ( N = 83, ρ = 0.89) z -value = 4.816, p -value = 0.0002], with the same direction (the strength of the relationship between liking and trustworthiness is higher than the correlation between aesthetic appearance and trustworthiness) reported in other works that compared both the aesthetic appearance and liking with trustworthiness (e.g., Ramos et al., 2016 , see Tables 1 , ​ ,2 2 ).

5. Conclusion

In this work, we investigated the generalizability and stability over time of the HE (esthetic × trustworthiness). Our results show that the strength of the correlation between the perceived aesthetic and trustworthiness of strangers' faces is affected by the age of presented faces, but not by their ethnicity or gender. These results support the body of literature on the specificity of children faces. Moreover, this research serve to add to the limited amount of works that investigated the consistency of the HE elicited by aesthetics and trustworthiness across different cultures, and especially in Asian and Caucasian individuals. Additionally, our results show that when a major event that disrupts people's perception of others is presented, such as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic outbreak, the strength of the association between perceived aesthetics and trustworthiness is less stable for adults' as compared to children's faces. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first study that examines (i) the effect of gender, age, and ethnicity simultaneously on the strength of the relationship between aesthetics and trustworthiness, as well as the stability of the HE over time when measures that can affect trustworthiness judgments of others (e.g., social distancing) are in place. From a more practical point of view, our results are open to the possibility that external events or actions can affect the relationship between aesthetics and trustworthiness. For example, individuals may use tactics to increase their own perceived trustworthiness or to reduce the perceived trustworthiness of others. We can think of politicians, for example, salesmen, or more in general, activities that require us to interact with a stranger and to evaluate the trustworthiness of a person before approaching or interacting with him or her. Overall, results of our work confirm the generalizability of the HE across cultures, as well as the specificity of children's faces. Additionally, our work provides a first investigation of the stability of the HE over time. Future studies should investigate the effect on more specific ethnic subgroups (e.g., Japanese vs. Chinese), when the stability of the HE is systematically influenced by mean of an experimental paradigm (e.g., priming), and in a period of time where there is a limited influence of external events on judgment toward others' traits.

Data Availability Statement

Ethics statement.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Institutional Review Board—Nanyang Technological University. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

GG and GE conceptualized, designed, and conducted the study. AL and PS revised the analytical method. GG drafted the manuscript, while all the authors contributed to the final version of the manuscript. GE supervised the project.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Funding. GE was supported by NAP SUG 2015, Singapore Ministry of Education ACR Tier 1 (RG149/16 and RT10/19). PS was support by Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 RG55/15 and Social Science Research Thematic Grant MOE2016-SSRTG-017.

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The Halo Effect Experiment

David Webb  (Owner, writer & host of All-About-Psychology.Com)

The concept of the halo effect is an intriguing and influential psychological phenomenon that is intimately tied to our perceptions and judgments of others. At its core, the halo effect reflects the tendency for our positive or negative impression of an individual in one trait or domain, to influence our perception of that individual in relation to other areas or traits. This perceptual concept was first articulated by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920, who noted that soldiers' ratings for different traits were not independent, but were instead highly correlated with one another. Thorndike posited that this was due to raters' overall impressions of the soldiers' abilities influencing their ratings on specific traits.

As a result of the pioneering work of Thorndike, the halo effect became the subject of increasing applied research and experimentation, designed to shed light on its underlying mechanisms and the ways in which it impacts our perceptions and judgments. One of the most notable early studies on the halo effect was conducted by psychologist Solomon Asch in 1946, in which he found that participants' judgments of an individual's personality were heavily influenced by their physical attractiveness. The start of this landmark study read as follows:

We look at a person and immediately a certain impression of his character forms itself in us. A glance, a few spoken words are sufficient to tell us a story about a highly complex matter. We know that such impressions form with remarkable rapidity and with great ease. Subsequent observation may enrich or upset our first view, but we can no more prevent its rapid growth than we can avoid perceiving a given visual object or hearing a melody. We also know that this process, though often imperfect, is also at times extraordinarily sensitive.

This remarkable capacity we possess to understand something of the character of another person, to form a conception of him as a human being, as a center of life and striving, with particular characteristics forming a distinct individuality, is a precondition of social life. In what manner are these impressions established? Are there lawful principles regulating their formation?

One particular problem commands our attention. Each person confronts us with a large number of diverse characteristics. This man is courageous, intelligent, with a ready sense of humor, quick in his movements, but he is also serious, energetic, patient under stress, not to mention his politeness and punctuality. These characteristics and many others enter into the formation of our view. Yet our impression is from the start unified; it is the impression of one person. We ask: How do the several characteristics function together to produce an impression of one person? What principles regulate this process?

You can read  Forming Impressions of Personality by Solomon Asch in full for free by clicking on the image below. 

Halo Effect

A rating bias in which a general evaluation (usually positive) of a person, or an evaluation of a person on a specific dimension, influences judgments of that person on other specific dimensions. For example, a person who is generally liked might be judged as more intelligent, competent, and honest than he or she actually is.

( American Psychological Association of Psychology Dictionary of Psychology )

(Nisbett and Wilson)

As research into the halo effect progressed, it began to encompass a wider range of traits and domains. In the 1960s, studies by psychologist David C. McClelland and his colleagues demonstrated that the halo effect also impacts perceptions of intelligence and competence. However, it was the halo effect experiment conducted by Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy DeCamp Wilson from the University of Michigan - the results of which were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1977 - which is arguably the most important and influential study in this field. Demonstrating as it did, that the halo effect also operates in the realm of social interactions, influencing our perceptions of others' personalities and abilities. Here's the abstract and an extract from this classic study.

Two different videotaped interviews were staged with the same individual—a college instructor who spoke English with a European accent. In one of the interviews the instructor was warm and friendly, in the other, cold and distant. The subjects who saw the warm instructor rated his appearance, mannerisms, and accent as appealing, whereas those who saw the cold instructor rated these attributes as irritating These results indicate that global evaluations of a person can induce altered evaluations of the person's attributes, even when there is sufficient information to allow for independent assessments of them. Furthermore, the subjects were unaware of this influence of global evaluations on ratings of attributes. In fact, the subjects who saw the cold instructor actually believed that the direction of influence was opposite to the true direction. They reported that their dislike of the instructor had no effect on their ratings of his attributes but that their dislike of his attributes had lowered their global evaluations of him .

The present results support the strong interpretation of the halo effect phenomenon. They indicate that global evaluations alter evaluations of attributes about which the individual has information fully sufficient to allow for an independent assessment. These results, it should be noted, are consistent with the very earliest theorizing about the phenomenon. Thorndike (1920), who gave the phenomenon its name, clearly believed that it represented far more than an effect on presumptions about or interpretations of the evaluative meaning of attributes, but rather that it represented a fundamental inability to resist the affective influence of global evaluation on evaluation of specific attributes .

The Halo Effect in Action

Powerful talk on the halo effect of racism and stereotypes.

About The Author

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Halo Effect

• Living reference work entry
• First Online: 24 February 2024
• Cite this living reference work entry

• Zuo Bin 2  

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Halo effect is a psychological phenomenon of overall impression deviation in the process of perception of a person due to the generalization of certain qualities of the ratee. In 1907, American psychologist Frederic Lyman Wells first proposed the halo effect phenomenon, referring to it as error of the halo. In 1920, Edward Lee Thorndike’s study discovered that people with one or two positive traits led others to give more positive trait inferences about them, and the overall impression directly affected the rater’s impression evaluation of other specific aspects of the ratee. Thorndike named this phenomenon the halo effect. American Psychologists Solomon E. Asch, Harold Harding Kelley, et al., in the experiment of impression formation found that the pair of traits of “warm” and “cold” had apparent halo effect.

In 1990, Sebastiano A. Fisicaro and Charles E. Lance summed up the three types of halo effect: (1) General impression halo effect. The halo rater generalizes the overall...

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Aronson E, Wilson TD, Akert RM (2014) Social psychology, 8th edn. Pearson India Education Services Pvt. Ltd, Chennai

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Yue G-A (2013) Social psychology, 2nd edn. China Renmin University Press, Beijing

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Bin, Z. (2024). Halo Effect. In: The ECPH Encyclopedia of Psychology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6000-2_581-1

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The Halo Effect and the Cognitive Blind-Spot: Rethinking Cognitive Biases

Cognitive biases are often immune to introspective processes. This cognitive blindness has been identified as an important factor in initiating and maintaining errors in cognitive decisions. Despite its importance, no formal model or mechanism is yet to be offered to explain its source or structure. Using the Halo Effect (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) as an exemplar of cognitive biases, as well as a review of the relationship between introspection and cognitive biases (Pronin, Gilovich, & Ross, 2004), this review identifies introspective blindness as a central and underexplored component of cognitive biases. By applying existing models for the operation of perceptual-motor decision-making, a preliminary and novel synthesis is offered to explain the structure of cognitive biases as an extension of motor-perceptual biases. This proposed model is then illustrated to explain both the root of the blind-spot that accompanies cognitive biases in general, as well as how it may apply to the Halo Effect specifically.

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False polarization (FP) is an interpersonal bias on judgement, the effect of which is to lead people in contexts of disagreement to overestimate the differences between their respective views. I propose to treat FP as a problem of applied social epistemology—a barrier to reliable belief-formation in certain social domains—and to ask how best one may debias for FP. This inquiry leads more generally into questions about effective debiasing strategies; on this front, considerable empirical evidence suggests that intuitively attractive strategies for debiasing are not very effective, while more effective strategies are neither intuitive nor likely to be easily implemented. The supports for more effective debiasing seem either to be inherently social and cooperative, or at least to presuppose social efforts to create physical or decision-making infrastructure for mitigating bias. The upshot, I argue, is that becoming a less biased epistemic agent is a thoroughly socialized project.

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The current study was designed to address the following research question: Can a computer game provide an effective mechanism for training adults to identify and mitigate their cognitive biases? Human decision making relies on a variety of simple heuristic decision rules that can be quick and effective mental shortcuts when making judgments. However, these heuristics can also lead to irrational thinking and problem-solving in ways that produce errors or illogicality, known as cognitive biases. Though knowledge of cognitive biases and bias mitigation strategies can help to reduce the potential impact of cognitive biases on human reasoning, such deeply ingrained cognitive strategies are difficult to alter. The current study was designed to leverage the virtual learning environment of a serious game to take on this training challenge. To that end, a training game – Missing: The Pursuit of Terry Hughes (Missing) – was developed. Missing was created for an audience of educated adults, and the described instructional design is based on current research on effective andragogical learning theory. The Missing game design immerses the user into bias-invoking situations which provide direct experience with cognitive bias identification and mitigation strategies. In this paper, details of the game instructional design are presented, including a cognitive framework based on dual-process systems of reasoning which relates multiple biases, their causes, and mitigation techniques. An external test campaign was conducted to determine whether the game had a positive transfer of in-game experiential learning about biases to real world skills and behavior change. Results are presented that suggest this novel serious game both engages and trains players, resulting in measurable reductions in cognitive biases.

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; Leadership Blind Spots means, not or unable to see beyond his/her vision by a leader. Those who aspire to become an entrepreneur, a professional in any field, a manager or a leader who has a vision will have to take the road uphill task. Anyone aspiring to become a business leader, entrepreneur or an effective professional needs to be aware of these conversational blind spots. They usually depend on the quality of our culture, which depends on the quality of our relationships, which depends on the quality of our conversations. Everything happens through conversations. Most importantly we tend to loose focus on certain blind spots which occur inadvertantly most of the time and at times supernaturally due to the leaders not sensing it. The blind spots are five like false assumptions, underestimating emotions, lack of empathy, making our own meaning, assuming shared meaning. Any leader need to be alert on the above five blind spots and need to take guard like having his concience questioning before speaking like Do I need to be on guard — and how?, Can I trust this person?,Where do I belong? Do I fit in? What do I need to be successful? and How do I create value with others?. This Exploratory study will reveal those conceptual clarity on the Leadership blind spots and its psychological implications on the individual and leadership personality for personal and professional success. This study will particularly focus on Leadership blind spots.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

An analysis of the generalizability and stability of the halo effect during the covid-19 pandemic outbreak.

• 1 Psychology Program, School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
• 2 LKC School of Medicine, School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
• 3 Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

The influence on the global evaluation of a person based on the perception of a single trait is a phenomenon widely investigated in social psychology. Widely regarded as Halo effect , this phenomenon has been studied for more than 100 years now, and findings such as the relationship between aesthetic perception and other personality traits—such as competence and trustworthiness—have since been uncovered. Trustworthiness plays an especially crucial role in individuals' social interactions. Despite the large body of literature published on the Halo effect, and especially on the relationship between aesthetic appearance and perceived trustworthiness, little is known about the overall generalizability of the effect, as almost all of the studies have been conducted on adult participants from Western countries. Moreover, little is known about the stability of the effect over time, in the event of major destabilization, such as the outbreak of a pandemic. In this work, the cross-cultural generalizability of the Halo effect is investigated before and during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic. An analysis of the generalizability and stability over time of the Halo effect is presented. Participants ( N = 380, N = 145 Asians, N = 235 Caucasians) have been asked to rate the aesthetic appearance and perceived trustworthiness of a set of human faces of different ages, gender, and ethnicity. Result of our analysis demonstrated that the Halo effect (Aesthetic × trustworthiness) is influenced by the age of presented faces, but not by their gender or ethnicity. Moreover, our results show that the strength of the effect can be affected by external events and that the volatility is higher for adults' than children's faces.

1. Introduction

The Halo effect (HE) is a cognitive bias in impression formation whereby the general evaluation of individuals' attributes is based on the evaluation of a single attribute ( Nisbett and Wilson, 1977 ). When applied to aesthetic appearance, the HE is observed when the physical appearance is used as a basis for the evaluations of other attributes that are unrelated to appearance whatsoever. For example, a stranger who looks good is also perceived as intelligent or smart, even though intelligence and smarts are unrelated to physical attractiveness ( Todorov et al., 2009 ). As a subclass of the confirmation bias in impression formation ( Nickerson, 1998 ), the HE is known to be intuitive, pervasive, and constant ( Cooper, 1981 ; Feldman, 1986 ; Kozlowski et al., 1986 ; Feeley, 2002 ). The HE is a widely investigated psychological phenomena, with an impact on different academic fields such as social psychology, computer science, and empirical aesthetics ( Hartmann et al., 2008 ; Todorov et al., 2009 ; Tuch et al., 2012 ; Ferrari et al., 2017 ).

1.1. Aesthetics and Trustworthiness

The term “Halo Effect” was first proposed by Thorndike (1920) to describe the radiating effects of a single attribute on the evaluations of other attributes. The term resonates with paintings from the medieval period, in which saints were often crowned with a glowing circle around their heads, representing their general reverence or goodness. Empirically, the HE has been observed in numerous domains of impression formation. Early demonstrations of the effect (e.g., Asch, 1946 ), for instance, have shown that central attributes, such as social warmth or physical appearance, have predictable and radiating effects on the inferences of other attributes. Compared to an unattractive person, an attractive person is often assumed to be happier, more competent at work, more successful in marriage, even though none of these inferences are supported by evidence ( Dion et al., 1972 ). Consistent with this work, other studies have demonstrated the HE of physical appearance in a host of social domains, from intellect ( Landy and Sigall, 1974 ) and personality ( Little et al., 2006 ) all the way to moral deservingness ( Dion, 1972 ; Forgas et al., 1983 ), integrity ( Dion, 1972 ), and many more (see Eagly et al., 1991 , for a review).

Together, these results cast light on the associative nature of impression formation. That is, inferences about others are generally guided by the implicit rule that whatever good (e.g., beautiful) goes with the good (e.g., generous), and whatever bad (e.g., unattractive) goes with the bad (e.g., unintelligent). Such a rule, compatible with the Gestalt principle of coherence ( Thagard, 2000 ), is regarded as a cognitive explanation for the HE. In the next paragraphs, we focus on how appearance may affect the perception of trustworthiness.

The impact of aesthetic appearance on perceived trustworthiness, also known as HE aesthetics × trustworthiness ( Todorov et al., 2009 ), has been studied since the early years of the twentieth century. Unlike aesthetic appearance, trustworthiness is a global or “umbrella” trait that is fundamental to social perception ( Fiske et al., 2007 ), with diverse implications in numerous life domains, such as in assessing another person's good or ill intentions.

Other works have replicated the impact of aesthetic appearance on perceived trustworthiness, with more aesthetically/physically attractive individuals being perceived as more trustworthy. For example, in a study conducted by Carter (1978) on the appearance of counselors—a replication of a previous study conducted by Cash et al. (1975) —revealed that attractive counselors are also perceived as more intelligent, warm, competent, and trustworthy. The strength of the effect was further confirmed in a review ( Eagly et al., 1991 ) where aesthetic attractiveness was found to be positively linked with perceived social competence across 76 studies.

1.2. But Is Attractive Always Trustworthy?

Despite the large body of literature on the relationship between aesthetic appearance and trustworthiness, several questions remain unanswered. Almost all of the available literature focused, in fact, on adult individuals sampled from the WEIRD population, rendering generalizability an issue ( Henrich et al., 2010 ; Jones, 2010 ). Moreover, even though some studies have been conducted on children's faces, demonstrating that the effect exists in children ( Dion et al., 1972 ), there are limited comparisons on the impact of adults vs. children targets. As children's faces are known to be special stimuli that automatically capture adults' visual attention and elicit parental care ( Brosch et al., 2007 ; Proverbio and De Gabriele, 2019 ; Venturoso et al., 2019 ), the HE may be present with different strengths between adult and child faces. Not only children's faces, but also adults' faces with facial traits that resemble the stereotypical traits of children, such as big round eyes, have been shown to influence adult viewers' estimations such that baby-faced adults are perceived as more trustworthy, warm, and innocent (see Zebrowitz, 1997 , for a review). Moreover, repeated exposure to the same face has been reported to influence viewers' judgments of others' traits and skills, such as in the judgment of politicians' competence ( Zajonc, 2001 ; Verhulst et al., 2010 ).

Finally, controversial results have been found for what concerns the importance of the rated individuals' gender. Significant differences between the scores given to males and females have been found in the works of Carter (1978) , but not in others ( Wetzel et al., 1981 ). One possibility for this is that in Carter (1978) , there was an additional stereotype playing a part in the interaction participant gender × counselor gender), which is in people's mental representation of the stereotypical counselor ( Chambers, 1983 ). To overcome the limitations of previous studies, this study aims to verify how the (a) ethnicity (ingroup vs. outgroup), (b) age (adult vs. baby), (c) gender (male vs. female), and (d) aesthetic attractiveness combine in shaping trust perception. More specifically, in this work, we investigate the aesthetics and trustworthiness perception of Asians and White/Caucasians adults raters of both adults' and children's faces, both males and females, of Asians and Caucasians ethnicities.

The data collection stage of the project, with the methods described in section 2.2, started in August 2019 and continued through April 2020. The data collection phase overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. Serendipitously, the data collected for this project allowed us to investigate the stability of the HE over time over time. One additional hypothesis—H 2 —was therefore added to study such effects.

1.3. Aim and Hypothesis

We formulated two hypotheses. The first hypothesis, analytic plan, and method were pre-registered on the Open Science Framework; the second hypothesis was formulated after beginning the data collection. The complete analytic plan is reported in section 2.3.

H 1 : “ Aesthetic attractiveness is positively correlated with perceived trust (HE). We predict the age of presented face to have an effect on the strength of the relationship, with the strength of the correlation higher for adults than for children's targets, but not the ethnicity or the gender of presented face.”

Rationale : Children's faces elicit parental care regardless of kinship and hence, capture greater attention compared to adults faces ( Brosch et al., 2007 ; Glocker et al., 2009 ; Parsons et al., 2011 ; Venturoso et al., 2019 ). Additionally, a recent study conducted by Collova et al. (2019) —based on a two-dimensional model (trustworthiness and dominance) from Oosterhof and Todorov (2008) —investigated whether children's faces elicit the same signal threat responses to adults' faces. Results of Collova's studies revealed that adults rate children's faces on different dimensions to adults' faces. More specifically, when rating children's faces, the evaluation is not based on trustworthiness. This suggests that evaluation of children's faces are not judged on their perception of trustworthiness, regardless of how aesthetically attractive they are. If so, one should expect the relationship between aesthetic appearance and trustworthiness to be stronger for adults' ratings of adults' faces as compared to children's faces. Therefore, we can expect the relationship between aesthetic appearance and trustworthiness to be stronger for adults' ratings of adults', as compared to adults' ratings of children's faces. From prior work, we know that gender ( Wetzel et al., 1981 ) and ethnicity ( Xu et al., 2012 ) do not seem to moderate the HE. But for the sake of completion, we decided to investigate these two demographic variables, with the expectation that neither gender nor ethnicity will have a significant impact on our observed results. In line with previous studies, we do not expect to find a significant impact of gender on the strength of the effect. With regard to ethnicity, differences may be present in the aesthetic ratings given to individuals of the ingroup or of the outgroup. However, as the implicit judgment of trustworthiness is based on the elaboration of facial cues that occur faster than the elaboration of ethnicity-specific traits (e.g., shape of the eyes; Engell et al., 2007 ), we do not expect any differences between the strength of the effect for ingroup and outgroup are expected.

H 2 : “ When individuals are asked to rate the aesthetic and trustworthiness of others' faces, we expect to see changes in the variability of the ratings after the diffusion of news about COVID-19 in trustworthiness but not aesthetic judgments toward adults but not children's faces.”

Rationale : Research has established that Asian and Caucasian faces are perceived as distinct categories ( Zhou et al., 2020 ). In a study conducted by Xu et al. (2012) , it was reported that when making inferences about the trustworthiness of others from their aesthetic appearance, Chinese and Caucasians adopt the same strategies. However, Koopmans and Veit (2014) found that negative inter-ethnic contact can cause reduced trust toward members of the outgroup. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic global threat, following the diffusion of news about the spreading of the novel coronavirus in China, and with politicians targeting a specific ethnic group ( Zheng et al., 2020 ), we can expect the situation to bias non-Asians against Asians, hence reducing Caucasians' estimation of trustworthiness, but not of aesthetics, toward Asian adults' faces. Previous research work by Fincher et al. (2008) highlighted that regions with a stronger history of contagious diseases are more likely to adopt collectivistic behaviors, including outgroup hostilities. It is therefore possible that, with the subsequent outbreak in Western countries, together with the adoption of specific measures to counter the diffusion of the virus in Eastern countries, collectivist beliefs brought about a reduction in the perceived trustworthiness, but not aesthetics, of Caucasians as evaluated by Asians. Such findings will suggest that salient threats of contagion, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, may elicit the tendency to prefer interactions with familiar ingroups and reject unfamiliar outgroups. This tendency, given its strong evolutionary undertone, should be present in most people regardless of their culture. Account for this assumption, one should expect a global reduction of trust in the perception of adult faces, regardless of the cultural backgrounds of these adult faces. Such global reduction, however, should not be observed in the aesthetic perception, which unassociated with the threat of contagion. Taken together, these hypotheses suggest that we should see a generalized reduction of trust, but not aesthetics, toward both Asians and Caucasians adults' faces. For evaluation of children's faces, a different situation is expected. In an event-related potential (ERP) study conducted by Proverbio and De Gabriele (2019) , it is reported that the other-race effect does not apply to infants' faces, supporting the specificity of the age of a face over its ethnicity for young faces. Differences in adults' perception of adults' and children's faces in other-race effects studies were also reported by Kuefner et al. (2008) , in a series of three experimental studies. These findings suggest that the salience of infants' and children's faces should limit the impact of race on the estimation of other traits. Building on the work from Collova et al. (2019) reported above (H 1 ), we can expect an early evaluation of infants' faces not to have an influence on perceived trustworthiness. Taken together, findings on the specificity of infants' and children's faces suggest that the age dimension plays a prominent role, more than the possible perceived threat dimension, in the evaluation of children's faces. It is therefore possible that, when presented with faces of children, adults' trustworthiness judgments are less likely to be influenced by the aesthetic traits of a child's face, as compared to when they are rating an adult's face. From a biological point of view, this behavior would reflect mammals', and especially humans', altruistic responses toward infants ( Preston, 2013 ). Consequently, we do not expect any difference in the judgment of both the aesthetic and trustworthiness of children's faces before and during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak.

2.1. Participants

The study was approved by the Internal Review Board of Nanyang Technological University (PSY-IRB-2019-008 and IRB-2019-10-019) and conducted according to the declaration of Helsinki. Informed consent was obtained from all the participants before the study. Participants ( N = 380, M age = 25.0±8.49) voluntarily participated and were recruited through the Nanyang Technological University's School of Social Sciences Research Participation System or online through different social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and the Subreddit community “samplesize,” with no geographical constraints. These social media and communities were selected in order to ensure our Caucasian sample would be composed of participants from different geographical areas, and especially North America and Europe. The gender and ethnicity of participants are reported in Table 1 .

Table 1 . Participants' demographic information.

2.2. Study Design

2.2.1. stimuli.

Participants were presented with 64 faces of two different age groups (32 adults, 32 children), genders (32 males, females), and ethnicities (Asians, Caucasians). This structure allowed for the presentation of eight faces per combination of age, gender, and ethnicity (e.g., 8 adult Asian male faces). Front-facing images of faces ( N = 64) were selected from the FFHQ Dataset ( Karras et al., 2019 ), a dataset containing 70,000 high-quality (1,024 × 1,024) images published on Flickr2, an online photo management, and sharing tool, under different creative commons and public domain licenses (Creative Commons BY 2.0, Creative Commons BY-NC 2.0, Public Domain Mark 1.0, Public Domain CC0 1.0, or U.S. Government Works license). The dataset itself is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license by NVIDIA Corporation and has been successfully used in previous publications ( Karras et al., 2019 ; Kynkäänniemi et al., 2019 ; Wang et al., 2019 ; Zhao et al., 2020 ). Stimuli selection was conducted in such a way to create groups of eight ( N = 8) faces for each possible combination of age, gender, and ethnicity. While values of aesthetics pleasantness were not available in the source dataset, images were selected with the aim to cover all the possible spectrum of values for aesthetics for each combination of age, gender, and ethnicity. More specifically, for each combination, four ( N = 4) images were selected among those we expected would have obtained low (<50) values of aesthetics, and four ( N = 4) we expected would have been rated high (>50) in aesthetics. The manipulation successfully worked, as values that covered the whole spectrum of possible ratings were obtained, and enough variance was achieved for the set of faces in both aesthetics and trustworthiness ratings, of which we expected four images to receive lower ratings in aesthetics and four to receive higher ratings in aesthetics. Selected faces were presented in random order, with no time constraints.

2.2.2. Procedure

After having signed the informed consent, participants were instructed about the scope and procedure of the experiment, as well as the taxonomy employed in the study. Participants rated each face for aesthetic pleasantness (“ How much do you like this person?” ) and trustworthiness (“ How much do you trust this person?” ) on a 100-point sliding scale, anchored from 1 being “not at all” not to 100 = “extremely.” The effectiveness of the first question at measuring aesthetic pleasantness has been verified comparing our results with previous works that focused on the relationship between liking and trustworthiness. More details are reported in section 4.

2.3. Analytic Plan

The analytic plan was pre-registered on the Open Science Framework. Additional information can be found online on the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/5cge3 ). A power analysis was conducted to estimate the number of participants required for this study (H 1 ). Given that previous works have found the effect size for the HE of human faces to be of medium strength, to take into account a possible bias in published works ( Collaboration, 2015 ; Camerer et al., 2018 ), we assumed a very weak effect size to estimate the required number of participants. Assuming six groups (children/adult, male/female, Asian/Caucasian), a very weak effect size (Cohen's d = 0.1), and to achieve a power of 0.95 at a 0.05 alpha value, a power analysis conducted in G*Power ( Faul et al., 2007 , 2009 ) revealed that N = 330 participants are required to perform an analysis of variance. The strength of the HE is measured as the Pearson's correlation between aesthetic and trustworthiness ratings. To test H 1 , a 2 × 2 × 2 analysis of variance was employed to control for the existence of significant effects of gender, age, and ethnicity on the strength of the HE, measured as the Persons' correlation between aesthetics and trustworthiness judgments. A z -test is employed as a post-hoc test to test whether the HE is stronger for adults than children faces. Additionally, a confirmatory analysis is conducted by means of a multiple linear regression analysis.

For what concerns the second hypothesis (H 2 ), four Levene's tests for equality of variance have been conducted on aesthetics and trustworthiness, comparing the variance of data collected before and after the diffusion of news about the novel coronavirus, once for adults' faces and one for children's faces. As a threshold, we used February 1, 2020, which is, according to Google Trend 2, the moment in which people started to show interest toward the SARS-CoV-2. In order for H 2 to be verified, we expected significant differences in the variance of trustworthiness ratings toward adults' faces before and after our threshold date, but not for adults' faces aesthetics ratings, nor for both aesthetics and trustworthiness ratings toward children's faces. To take into account the multiple numbers of tests conducted, a correction for multiple tests using the Benjamini–Hochberg procedure, with a false discovery rate of 0.10, is employed.

3.1. Effect of Ethnicity, Age, and Gender on the Strength of the Halo Effect

To evaluate the effects of ethnicity, age, and gender on the strength of the HE, measured as the Pearson's correlation between aesthetics (mean = 55.97 ± 19.81) and trustworthiness (mean = 53.83 ± 21.82), an analysis of variance has been conducted. Results of the analysis of variance revealed only a main effect of age ( F -value = 9.753, p -value = 0.00194, η p 2 =0.03, Effect size f = 0.18, correlation among repeated measures = 0.503, achieved power = 1.0) but no main effect of gender or ethnicity, as well as no significant effects of the interaction between age and gender, or gender and ethnicity on the strength of the HE (aesthetics × trustworthiness). A significant interaction between face's age and ethnicity (ingroup vs. outgroup) is highlighted ( F -value = 6.31, p -value = 0.0124), such that the differences in strength of the HE between Ingroup's Adults and Children faces ( t -value = 3.98, uncorrected p -value= 7.11 · 10 -5 ) are bigger than the differences between Outgroup's Adults and Children faces ( t -value = 1.22, uncorrected p -value = 0.221). This may however be caused by the diffusion of news about the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. In fact, by repeating the analysis only on a subset of data collected before the initial diffusion of information about the novel coronavirus ( N = 179), the interaction between ethnicity (ingroup or outgroup) and age of presented faces is not significant ( F -value = 2.465, uncorrected p -value = 0.118).

These results suggest that the strength of the relationship between aesthetics and trustworthiness (Pearson's r = 0.676, p = < 0.001) are influenced by the age of presented faces, which is whether it is a child or an adult face but not by its gender or ethnicity. Taken together, the findings suggest that, at a general level, when adult raters make inferences about others' aesthetic and trustworthiness, they do not rate people of different gender or ethnicity differently, but they adopt different strategies for adults and children.

More specifically, the strength of the relationship between aesthetics and trustworthiness is significantly higher ( z -test t = 3.626, p -value = 0.000287, Figures 1 , 2 ) for adult (M = 0.53±0.41) than for children faces (M = 0.47±0.46). These results indicate that adults are more likely to estimate the trustworthiness of other adults from their aesthetic appearance, while the estimation is less consistent when it comes to predicting the trustworthiness of children from their appearance.

Figure 1 . Strength of the halo effect ( pearson-r ) by age.

Figure 2 . Distribution of aesthetics and trustworthiness judgments by age.

Additionally, the strength of the relationship between the two variables has been further confirmed using a multiple linear regression analysis, with the formula reported in Equation (1). Results are reported in Table 2 .

A subsequent exploratory analysis revealed that the effect is significantly stronger for Asian participants, as compared to Caucasian participants ( t = 13.2, uncorrected p -value = 9.68·10 -39 ). Further exploring the difference between Asian and Caucasian participants, both groups showed no significant differences in the HE elicited by younger faces of their same ingroup and outgroup (Asian participants: t = −0.67, uncorrected p -value = 0.503; Caucasian participants: t = −0.935, uncorrected p -value = 0.351). Focusing on the behavior of a single ethnic group (e.g., Asians participants), no differences have been found on the correlation of aesthetics and trustworthiness ratings of Asian (ingroup) and Caucasian (outgroup) faces ( t = −1.551, uncorrected p -value = 0.122). On the other hand, the strength of the HE —measured as the correlation between aesthetics and trustworthiness ratings—is significantly higher for ingroup (Caucasian) as compared to outgroup (Asian) faces ( t = 4.026, uncorrected p -value = 6.697 ·10 -05 ).

Table 2 . Results of the multiple linear regression used to investigate the strength of the HE and the influence of age, gender, ethnicity, and aesthetic on trustworthiness.

3.2. Association of SARS-CoV-2 on the Strength of the Halo Effect Over Time

Four ( N = 4) Levene's tests for equality of variance have been employed to compare the variance of data (aesthetics and trustworthiness) collected before and after the initial diffusion of news about the novel coronavirus (H 2 ). The Benjamini–Hochberg procedure, with a false discovery rate of 0.10, is employed to take into account the number of performed tests. Results of the comparison between the variability in aesthetics and trustworthiness judgments toward both adults' and children's faces are reported in Table 3 . Results ( q -values) highlight significant changes in the variability of trustworthiness ratings toward adults' faces before and after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, but not in aesthetics ratings given to adults' faces, nor to aesthetics or trustworthiness ratings given to children's faces.

Table 3 . Results of Levene's test of variance for aesthetics and trustworthiness judgments toward adults' and children' faces ( q -values are evaluated using the Benjamini–Hochberg procedure at a 0.10 false discovery rate).

4. Discussion

Based on previous works within the field of the HE , we hypothesized that the impact of perceived aesthetic on trustworthiness judgments would depend on the age of presented faces, but not on their gender or ethnicity (H 1 ). Results of the analysis of variance show the main effect of the age of presented faces but not of gender or ethnicity, nor of any interaction effect between gender and ethnicity, confirming H 1 . Moreover, our post-hoc z -test confirmed that the relationship between aesthetics and trustworthiness is stronger for adults' as compared to children's faces. In light of the results here presented, our analysis supports the specificity of children's faces. In fact, only the age of the presented faces but not the gender or age influenced the strength of the HE in our sample, measured as the Pearson correlation between individuals' aesthetic appearance and perceived trustworthiness. As reported in previous works on the Baby Schema effect ( Venturoso et al., 2019 ), younger faces elicit specific responses in adult viewers. A possible explanation for this may be drawn from the evolutionary perspective. In fact, the cure of the offspring plays a central role in the survival of the species, and therefore adult individuals may be more prone to trust a younger individual even though the perceived aesthetic appearance is low. On the other hand, when looking at adult faces, the evaluation of someone's trustworthiness is largely based on made on the basis of the appearance.

Our exploratory analysis further confirmed the specificity of children's faces. In fact, both Caucasian and Asian participants revealed no significant differences in the strength of the HE when exposed to either children of their same ingroup or of their outgroup. While the same can be said for Asian adults looking at Asian and Caucasian adult faces, this does not hold true for for the Caucasians in our pool of participants, who indeed showed significant differences in the strength of the HE when exposed to faces of other Caucasians (higher Halo) as compared to adult Asians (lower Halo). This confirms previously published results on both the specificity of children faces, and significant differences in adults' physiological activation ( Esposito et al., 2014 ). While this goes beyond the initial plan of this work and has been in fact not treated as hypothesis confirmation but as exploratory analysis, the general findings here reported about the HE are in line with previous works that investigated cross-cultural differences across Asians and Caucasians with different methodologies. Future work should investigate significant differences between the strength of the Halo in Asian and Caucasian participants by properly defining one or more hypotheses and by recruiting an adequate number of participants to verify novel hypotheses with adequate power.

On the subject of the stability of the HE over time (H 2 ), the analysis of the variance of data collected before and after the diffusion of news about the novel coronavirus (section 3.2), revealed that adults' faces trustworthiness ratings, but not aesthetics ratings, significantly differ in the data collected before and after the diffusion of news about the novel coronavirus. Differently, no changes are found in the aesthetics and trustworthiness judgments of children's faces. These results are in line with our predictions on the specificity of children's faces. While our results confirm the possibility of modulating the strength of the HE, the current dataset does not allow the study of the qualitative impact of an external event, nor we can claim that changes in the stability are caused exclusively by the current pandemic and public policies. Future studies should address this problem by empirically presenting the external events, using a priming procedure, and measuring the impact over time with a longitudinal and experimental approach.

Despite the strength of the results here presented, there are several limitations worth highlighting. As mentioned earlier, the data collection stage started before and continued during the novel coronavirus pandemic outbreak. To reiterate, significant differences were found in the trustworthiness ratings given to adults faces before and during the pandemic outbreak. Therefore, while our first hypothesis (H 1 ) has been empirically verified accordingly to our preregistered plan, we cannot rule out the possibility that the overall world's situation played an indeterminate role in shaping our results, nor that events other than the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak influenced our results. Future works should investigate the stability of the effect under a controlled condition, such as by using a prime. Moreover, while we targeted Asian and Caucasian participants, we have not investigated the influence of participants' ethnicity at a more specific level (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). Future studies should focus on a single ethnic group to verify the consistency and generalizability of the results here presented. Additionally, while participants were informed of the scope of the experiment, including the fact that we were specifically interested in aesthetic appearance, participants whose first language is not English may not have a specific counterpart for this concept. Future works should investigate participants' behavior using questions posed in their native language. An additional note has to be placed on the terminology employed in this study. A possible critique is that the experimental setup does not allow to measure aesthetic pleasantness, but liking. While this is a valid critique, participants were informed of the scope of the experiment before enrolling and at the beginning of the experiment. Moreover, our results differ significantly from other works that investigate the relationship between liking and trustworthiness using a similar paradigm [e.g., Todorov et al., 2009 , comparison with Study 3 ( N = 83, ρ = 0.89) z -value = 4.816, p -value = 0.0002], with the same direction (the strength of the relationship between liking and trustworthiness is higher than the correlation between aesthetic appearance and trustworthiness) reported in other works that compared both the aesthetic appearance and liking with trustworthiness (e.g., Ramos et al., 2016 , see Tables 1 , 2 ).

5. Conclusion

In this work, we investigated the generalizability and stability over time of the HE (esthetic × trustworthiness). Our results show that the strength of the correlation between the perceived aesthetic and trustworthiness of strangers' faces is affected by the age of presented faces, but not by their ethnicity or gender. These results support the body of literature on the specificity of children faces. Moreover, this research serve to add to the limited amount of works that investigated the consistency of the HE elicited by aesthetics and trustworthiness across different cultures, and especially in Asian and Caucasian individuals. Additionally, our results show that when a major event that disrupts people's perception of others is presented, such as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic outbreak, the strength of the association between perceived aesthetics and trustworthiness is less stable for adults' as compared to children's faces. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first study that examines (i) the effect of gender, age, and ethnicity simultaneously on the strength of the relationship between aesthetics and trustworthiness, as well as the stability of the HE over time when measures that can affect trustworthiness judgments of others (e.g., social distancing) are in place. From a more practical point of view, our results are open to the possibility that external events or actions can affect the relationship between aesthetics and trustworthiness. For example, individuals may use tactics to increase their own perceived trustworthiness or to reduce the perceived trustworthiness of others. We can think of politicians, for example, salesmen, or more in general, activities that require us to interact with a stranger and to evaluate the trustworthiness of a person before approaching or interacting with him or her. Overall, results of our work confirm the generalizability of the HE across cultures, as well as the specificity of children's faces. Additionally, our work provides a first investigation of the stability of the HE over time. Future studies should investigate the effect on more specific ethnic subgroups (e.g., Japanese vs. Chinese), when the stability of the HE is systematically influenced by mean of an experimental paradigm (e.g., priming), and in a period of time where there is a limited influence of external events on judgment toward others' traits.

Data Availability Statement

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found at: https://doi.org/10.21979/N9/5IIVOM .

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Institutional Review Board—Nanyang Technological University. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

GG and GE conceptualized, designed, and conducted the study. AL and PS revised the analytical method. GG drafted the manuscript, while all the authors contributed to the final version of the manuscript. GE supervised the project.

GE was supported by NAP SUG 2015, Singapore Ministry of Education ACR Tier 1 (RG149/16 and RT10/19). PS was support by Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 RG55/15 and Social Science Research Thematic Grant MOE2016-SSRTG-017.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: halo effect, aesthetics, trustworthiness, SARS-nCoV-2, ethnicity

Citation: Gabrieli G, Lee A, Setoh P and Esposito G (2021) An Analysis of the Generalizability and Stability of the Halo Effect During the COVID-19 Pandemic Outbreak. Front. Psychol. 12:631871. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.631871

Received: 21 November 2020; Accepted: 08 February 2021; Published: 24 March 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Gabrieli, Lee, Setoh and Esposito. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Gianluca Esposito, gianluca.esposito@ntu.edu.sg

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Halo Effect

The halo effect: what it is and how to beat it, the halo effect is a decision bias that can cloud people’s judgements..

Posted October 8, 2021 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods

• The Halo effect involves people over-relying on first impressions.
• It can lead to poor judgements and affect choices, for example when recruiting new employees or choosing a romantic partner.
• A three-step approach that involves slowing down decisions can help to overcome the Halo effect.

If you are familiar with Beyoncé’s hit single “Halo,” you may have a sense of the all-encompassing brightness associated with halos. In the context of religious art, halos are crowns of light rays or luminous circles that surround the heads of heroes, saints or angels. The halo’s glow has the power to portray people in a special, otherworldly light. Given its influence on appearances, the halo also lends itself to describing a common bias in people’s judgements of others.

The Halo Effect

The Halo effect describes a curious phenomenon, whereby the way we perceive one character trait of a person influences all subsequent judgements of other, even unrelated character traits of the same person. As such, our first impression of a stranger often has spillover effects on all future evaluations of their personality and skills.

Consider the following example: Emira has been exchanging emails with Jodi, a new colleague from a different office. The first thing Emira notices when opening Jodi’s messages is her excellent use of grammar and punctuation. Emira is highly impressed with Jodi’s language skills and assumes she has a keen eye for detail. While this assessment may well be accurate, it ends up affecting her overall evaluation of Jodi’s work. For example, even though some of Jodi’s ideas lack feasibility, Emira tends to agree with all of her suggestions. The spillover effect even influences Emira’s judgement of Jodi’s personality. She has never met Jodi in person, yet she thinks of her as friendly and reliable, and, consequently invites Jodi to her birthday party.

The Halo effect is a well-established cognitive bias that was first discovered in the early 20th century when psychologist Edward Thorndike conducted a survey of industrial workers. Thorndike asked employers to rate their workers on different dimensions including physical qualities, intelligence , leadership skills, personal qualities and overall value to service. When analysing the data, Thorndike observed surprising patterns: People, who were judged highly on one characteristic typically also scored above average on the other questionnaire characteristics. For example, a worker perceived as good-looking was also rated as intelligent. Does that mean prettier people are generally smarter? Rather unlikely! Just like in the example above, a spillover effect from one characteristic to another is a much more plausible explanation.

Interestingly, the Halo effect can work in different directions: While a positive first impression helps to elevate future assessments of a person, a negative first impression is often just as pervasive. In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow , Daniel Kahneman discusses the negative Halo effect (sometimes also referred to as "Horn effect") in the context of Adolf Hitler’s personality. He writes:

The statement “Hitler loved dogs and little children” is shocking no matter how many times you hear it, because any trace of kindness in someone so evil violates the expectations set up by the Halo effect.

Does the Halo effect influence your life?

The Halo effect is a mental shortcut to help people make faster judgements. It also serves to increase the consistency of our evaluations and build easier narratives. People tend to avoid states of internal inconsistency : It’s easier to build a mental image of a person that’s all positive than it is to carefully construct a nuanced picture, which involves both good and bad aspects, depending on the context.

The Halo effect is particularly problematic in decision contexts, where initial judgments may have disproportionately large effects on later outcomes. Examples include job recruitment and romantic dating :

• Job recruitment: Alex is on the interview panel for a new colleague. As the second candidate walks in, the recognition hits him like a flash. The guy is a regular attendee at Alex’s local yoga class, and man, he’s a pro! Alex is completely taken with his strength and flexibility. During practice, he sometimes just watches him for inspiration. The interview hasn’t even started, yet, but Alex’s mind is made up. Given his outstanding yoga skills, this candidate surely must have other positive qualities. He will definitely get Alex’ vote.
• Dating: While enjoying after-work drinks in a local pub, Maya locks eyes with a handsome stranger. Her heart seems to skip a beat. His dark curls and strong features signal masculinity, warmth, ambition and kindness all at once. Maya is smitten and doesn’t seem to notice the stranger’s racist jokes and pushy dance moves. His attractiveness radiates just like a halo, and she ends up going home with him at the end of the night.

How to beat the Halo effect

The Halo effect often has dangerous consequences. It can cloud people’s judgements and mislead them to make unfair or inappropriate decisions. As demonstrated in the examples above, outcomes can include poor recruitment choices or inevitable heartbreak.

Luckily, there is a simple strategy for tackling the Halo effect and training yourself not to judge a book by its cover. Biases are most influential when we allow for automatic, intuitive and emotional thinking to influence our judgements. To reduce the influence of cognitive biases, we therefore have to slow things down and control subjective feelings. The following three-step process can help:

• Be aware: Awareness is the first step towards overcoming errors in judgement. Keeping in mind the potentially harmful consequences of first impressions is helpful when meeting new people. This might involve flagging up biases while shortlisting job candidates or reminding yourself of past judgement errors when embarking on a new relationship.
• Slow down: The second step is to deliberately slow down your judgement and any subsequent decisions. Never make a recruitment choice straight after the interview. Instead, you could prolong the decision process by scheduling another panel meeting for the next day. In the context of romantic dating, it's typically helpful to take your time when getting to know the other person. For example, you might decide to go on several dates before taking things to the next level.
• Be systematic: Finally, try to engage your analytical reasoning skills by taking a systematic approach. This sounds trickier than it is. In the context of interviewing, you could prepare a list of essential criteria and force yourself to consider each one carefully before making a choice. Similarly, when choosing a new romantic partner, you can follow a mental checklist of key “must-have's” or absolute “no-no's.” If you think a racist partner is going to cause problems in a long-term relationship, any racist jokes should ring alarm bells even if they have the looks of a professional model!

The Halo effect can cloud your judgement of others. At the same time, it may determine how other people perceive you. Would you want strangers to judge your personality based on a haircut gone wrong? Or a badly worded first email? It seems like all of us could do with incorporating the above suggestions to de-bias our judgements.

Eva Krockow, Ph.D. , is a researcher in decision making at the University of Leicester.

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• What Is the Halo Effect? | Definition & Examples

What Is the Halo Effect? | Definition & Examples

Published on December 2, 2022 by Kassiani Nikolopoulou . Revised on November 27, 2023.

The halo effect occurs when our overall positive impression of a person, product, or brand is based on a single characteristic. If our first impression is positive, the subsequent judgments we make will be colored by this first impression.

The halo effect can hamper our ability to think critically. It can be particularly problematic in decision-making contexts, such as job interviews and purchase decisions.

Table of contents

What is the halo effect, halo effect example, how to minimize the halo effect, other types of research bias, frequently asked questions.

The halo effect is a form of cognitive bias —a heuristic (or mental shortcut) that causes us to make snap judgments. In other words, the halo effect leads us to consider only one aspect of a person or a product in order to form a general opinion.

Snap judgments like these can help us navigate the world more seamlessly and make decisions faster, but they also put us at risk of poor decision-making.

When the halo effect is at play, a general evaluation of a person, or an evaluation of an aspect of their personality, influences how we view other, unrelated aspects of their personality. For example, if we consider someone to be attractive, we are more likely to assign them other positive qualities, such as intelligence, kindness, or honesty.

Overreliance on our first impressions can lead to poor decision-making, since we are unable to consider all the facts available to us. A positive first impression can be misleading. For example, when you find out your coworker went to a prestigious university, you might assume they are more skilled than they actually are.

Like other forms of heuristics, the halo effect is unconscious and not intentional. Because it clouds our judgment, the halo effect can be a source of research bias .

Halo and horn effect

While the halo effect refers to positive evaluations, a similar spillover effect occurs when a negative first impression warps our perception.

The horn effect is the tendency for a negative impression made in one context to influence our judgment in another. This means that we focus only on negative qualities and exclude any positive ones.

The halo effect is often used as a persuasion technique in marketing.

In reality, just because a product says it’s organic or has organic ingredients doesn’t mean it’s healthier. If you read the package, you would see that the organic bar is still high in sugar.

The halo effect can also explain brand loyalty and brand reputation.

After a few weeks, customers start complaining about the smartphone’s battery. Even so, you think that it’s still a good brand, and this is just an exception.

A favorable experience with a company’s product creates a halo that casts the company as a whole in a positive light. This prior good reputation protects the company in times of crisis (for example, when a new product turns out to be a flop) and deflects some of the reputational damage.

Although you can’t entirely avoid cognitive biases like the halo effect, there are a few tips that can help you minimize its impact:

• Bear in mind that everyone is prone to biased thinking. Keep reminding yourself that first impressions are not always right and can lead us to misjudge others.
• Slow down your thinking process. We are more likely to fall for the halo effect when emotional or intuitive thinking takes over. Instead, make sure you have clear evidence for your evaluations. For example, in the context of performance reviews, supervisors use a list of criteria and objective data to ensure that they are evaluating each employee fairly.
• Seek input from others, particularly from a “devil’s advocate” or someone neutral to the situation. Talk to someone who isn’t afraid to disagree with you and is neutral when it comes to the person or subject at hand. Compare their opinions to your own to see if they recognize the same qualities in a person that you do.

Cognitive bias

• Confirmation bias
• Baader–Meinhof phenomenon
• Availability heuristic
• Halo effect
• Hindsight bias
• Framing effect
• Affect heuristic
• Representativeness heuristic
• Anchoring heuristic
• Primacy bias
• Optimism bias

Selection bias

• Sampling bias
• Ascertainment bias
• Attrition bias
• Self-selection bias
• Survivorship bias
• Nonresponse bias
• Undercoverage bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Observer bias
• Omitted variable bias
• Publication bias
• Pygmalion effect
• Recall bias
• Social desirability bias
• Placebo effect
• Actor-observer bias
• Ceiling effect
• Ecological fallacy
• Affinity bias

The halo effect in marketing means that any characteristic of a product can affect how customers perceive its other characteristics, as well as how they perceive the product as a whole.

For example, poor packaging design can cause customers to think that the product is of low quality, even if there’s no direct connection between these characteristics. Similarly, appealing packaging can lead customers to view a product in a more positive light, even when it comes to attributes that aren’t related to its packaging.

The horn effect is the opposite of the halo effect . When the horn effect is at play, our negative first impressions in one context influence any subsequent judgment we make, even if the context is different.

For example, when you meet someone new and that person happens to be in a bad mood that day, you might conclude that they are bad-tempered because of this negative first impression.

Cognitive bias is an umbrella term used to describe the different ways in which our beliefs and experiences impact our judgment and decision making. These preconceptions are “mental shortcuts” that help us speed up how we process and make sense of new information.

However, this tendency may lead us to misunderstand events, facts, or other people. Cognitive bias can be a source of research bias .

Some common types of cognitive bias are:

• Anchoring bias
• Actor–observer bias
• Belief bias
• The halo effect
• The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon

Sources in this article

We strongly encourage students to use sources in their work. You can cite our article (APA Style) or take a deep dive into the articles below.

Nikolopoulou, K. (2023, November 27). What Is the Halo Effect? | Definition & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved September 16, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/research-bias/halo-effect/

Timothy Coombs, W.  and  Holladay, S.J.  (2006), “Unpacking the halo effect: reputation and crisis management”,  Journal of Communication Management , Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 123-137.  https://doi.org/10.1108/13632540610664698

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• DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.35.4.250
• Corpus ID: 17867385

The halo effect: Evidence for unconscious alteration of judgments.

• R. Nisbett , Timothy D. Wilson
• Published 1977
• Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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