Opinion: the halo effect means we often make snap judgements on another person based on their favourable or undesirable features
Cuter kids are thought to be smarter. Taller people get better salaries. After delivering the same lecture, students tend to believe that a male teacher is a professor, and a female teacher has a lower academic rank. Such biases in perceptions seem to be so fundamental that they are being studied for more than 100 years now.
One of the most influential psychologists of the previous century, Edward Thorndike, noted in a 1920 article that ratings of physique of co-workers in two large industrial corporations were very strongly linked to perceptions of intelligence, leadership and the character of the person. In other words, if someone has good looks, others may see this person as being more intelligent and in general a better character than someone who has less favourable appearance. Thorndike described this phenomena as a "halo" because the desirable feature appears to make other aspects of a person seem better too, despite the fact that the link between those features are only illusory.
Unfortunately, the bias works the other way as well. A feature or disposition which is seen as undesirable may permeate the general judgement of a person for the worse. This dark side of the halo is sometimes called "negative halo" or "horn" effect (after the devil's horn as opposed to the saintly glory of a halo).
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In an experiment, children saw photos of other children – either normal weight or overweight – for 200 milliseconds, only a flash. Then they had to make judgements on meaningless abstract figures. Those who had seen overweight children made much more negative judgements. This finding also sheds a light on that the halo effect works very quickly and in an implicit way, and is therefore hard to keep under conscious control.
But it is not only the looks that may trigger a dark halo and any feature that makes you a minority in your group can have the same effect. In a recent study, our team analysed data from more than 6,000 young people in Ireland, aged 12 to 19. We wanted to test if minority youth experience more discrimination, based on different grounds, than their non-minority peers. We investigated young people from four minority groups: sexual minorities, first generation immigrants, living with a disability or chronic condition or belonging to the Traveller community.
We asked young people if they have ever been treated unfairly or negatively because of where they or their parents or grandparents were born, gender, age, disability, race, sexual orientation, religion, being a member of the Traveller community, or other reasons. We compared the proportion of minority young people and their non-minority peers who reported they had ever been discriminated against.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland, is racial discrimination a problem in Irish third-level institutions?
While children of each group were more likely than their non-minority matches to feel discriminated against based on their minority, the results also showed "dark halos" for all four groups. Sexual minority young people were also more often discriminated based on their gender, age, religion or other reasons. Discrimination based on other reasons was also a frequent experience of youth living with a disability or chronic conditions, while it was much less prevalent in children without such a condition.
Immigrant young people were more likely than their non-immigrant peers to experience discrimination based on their race or religion. Traveller young people experienced more discrimination based on their place of birth, disability, race and sexual orientation than non-Travellers. It seems that their minority status led other people to make quick (and negative) assumptions on these young people and behave with disdain, scorn or outright prejudice.
There are beautiful people who are rotten - and there are short people with excellent work skills who would deserve the higher salaries their less-abled but taller colleagues earn. A Traveller is not any not worse a person than someone of the same gender, age and social class who does not belong to the Traveller community. Someone who is a lesbian may or may not be as respectable as someone else from the same community who identifies as heterosexual.
The problem is that our brain is not wired for the social and physical environment that we live in today
Having a certain look or belonging to a certain group (or not) is not associated with better abilities or character, or a moral superiority. We should not let the halo to distort how we see other people and make assumptions about their personality or other attributes based on their looks, race, gender, sexual orientation, disability status or any other features.
But isn’t that the norm? Why are bright and dark halos so powerful? Evolutionary psychology gives us an answer. Professor Martie G. Haselton and her colleagues from University of California, Los Angeles argue that such perception biases, from the point of evolution, are not design flaws but actually design features.
Let’s imagine you want to select the best friend or love partner. To make a grounded and unbiased judgement on someone, you would need to spend a lot of time with a person – not just carefully studying their looks but learn their opinions, check how they behave in different situations, and see whether they are loyal to you in the long run. In the whole process, you should remind yourself that their physique may have nothing to do with their intelligence or their race with their trustworthiness. How they behave on a bad day does not necessarily reflect what kind of person they are in general.
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From RTÉ Brainstorm, can your accent really affect your job prospects?
But in social interactions for thousands of years, we have had to make quick decisions, as our survival depended on it. Is this person friendly or not? Should I expect that they will attack me? And in terms of reproduction, is he or she a potential sexual partner? Do they have the physical features which show they are the best partner to have a baby with? Such decisions are orchestrated in the limbic system, a very ancient circuit in our brains (sometimes it is called "reptilian brain" because it stems from such an early evolutionary stage).
The problem is that our brain is not wired for the social and physical environment that we live in today. First impressions can be deceptive: it may turn out that someone with good looks is not that nice a person. Or more accurately, their good looks have nothing to do with how nice a person they are.
This quick decision process was indeed a useful design feature when our survival or reproductive success depended on it, but people nowadays rarely kill each other or mate with each other right on the spot. The halo, be it bright or dark, is misleading. The best thing we can teach children is to combat the halo: not to make a judgement on others based on their first impression but spend some time with them, think of the whole person and not only about their looks, to find out who they really are.
The full study is published by Health Education and Behavior
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
