Halo effect
The halo effect —a term coined by Edward Thorndike—is the tendency for positive impressions of a person, company, country, brand, or product in one area to positively influence one's opinion or feelings of a person, company, country, brand, or product in another area. It is "the name given to the phenomenon whereby evaluators tend to be influenced by their previous judgments of performance or personality;" in other words, a cognitive bias that can prevent people from forming an image based on the sum of all objective circumstances at hand.
A simplified example of the halo effect could be when people, after noticing that an individual in a photograph is attractive, well groomed, and properly attired, then assumes—using a mental heuristic based on the rules of their own social concept—that the person in the photograph is a good person. This constant error in judgment is reflective of the evaluators' preferences, prejudices, ideology, aspirations, and social perception.
Context and applications
Psychology
The term halo effect is used in psychology to describe a perception distortion that affects the way people interpret the information about others with whom they have formed a positive gestalt. For example, they find out that someone with whom they have formed a positive gestalt has cheated on his taxes; but because of the positive gestalt, they may dismiss the significance of this behavior or even think the person simply made a mistake. The halo effect refers to the tendency to evaluate an individual positively on many traits because of a shared belief.It is a type of immediate judgment discrepancy, or cognitive bias, in which a person making an initial assessment of another person, place, or thing will assume ambiguous information based on concrete information. The halo effect is an evaluation by an individual and can affect the perception of a decision, action, idea, business, person, group, entity, or other whenever concrete data is generalized or influences ambiguous information.
The halo effect can also be explained as the behavior of using evaluations based on unrelated criteria to make judgments about something or someone. The halo effect is sometimes used to refer specifically to when this behavior has a positive correlation, such as viewing someone who is attractive as likely to be successful and popular. When this judgment has a negative connotation, however, such as when someone unattractive is more readily blamed for a crime than someone attractive, it is sometimes referred to as the horn effect.
Marketing
The term halo effect is used in marketing to explain consumer bias toward certain products because of favorable experience with other products made by the same company. It is used in the part of brand marketing called "line extensions." One common halo effect is when the perceived positive features of a particular item extend to a broader brand. A notable example is the manner in which the popularity of Apple's iPod generated enthusiasm for the corporation's other products. Advertising often makes use of television shows, movies and those who star in them, to promote products via the halo effect.In the automotive industry, exotic, limited-production luxury models or low-volume sports cars made by a manufacturer's racing, motorsports, or in-house modification teams, are sometimes referred to as "halo cars" for the effect they are intended to produce on selling other vehicles within the make. To contrast this with the automotive terminology "flagship model".
In the wine industry, certain wine features create a halo effect that can influence the customer's opinion of a given wine. The inclusion of the category "organic" on the label of a wine can increase the consumer's positive valuation of the wine. Organic wines are conceived of as being healthy, having a better taste, scent, and color, and resulting in a higher degree of overall satisfaction. Another example of the halo effect in the wine industry is the association of traditional corks with wine quality: corked bottles are systematically rated as of higher quality than bottles that use screw caps and plastic caps since the latter are viewed as signifiers of low-quality wines.
Advertising in one channel has been shown to have a halo effect on advertising in another channel.
A halo effect with regard to health, dubbed a "health halo," is used in food marketing to increase sales of a product; it can result in increased consumption of the product in the halo, which may be unhealthy.
The term "halo effect" has also been applied to human rights organizations that have used their status to move away from their stated goals. Political scientist Gerald Steinberg has claimed that non-governmental organizations take advantage of the halo effect and are "given the status of impartial moral watchdogs" by governments and the news media.
The Ronald McDonald House, a widely known NGO, openly celebrates the positive outcomes it receives from the halo effect. The web page for the Ronald McDonald House in Durham, North Carolina, states that 95% of survey participants were aware of Ronald McDonald House Charities. This awareness is attributed to the halo effect, as employees, customers, and stakeholders are more likely to be involved in a charity that they recognize and trust, with a name and logo that are familiar.
A brand's halo effect can protect its reputation in the event of a crisis. An event that is detrimental to a brand that is viewed favorably would not be as threatening or damaging to a brand that consumers view unfavorably.
Other uses
Non-psychology/business use of the term "halo effect" describes the monetary value of the spillover effect when an organization's marketing budget is subsequently reduced. This was first demonstrated to students via the 1966 version of a textbook and a software package named "The Marketing Game."The halo effect can also be used in the case of institutions, as one's favorable perceptions regarding an aspect of an organization could determine a positive view of its entire operations. For example, if a hospital is known for its excellent open heart and cardiac program, then the community would expect it to excel in other areas as well. This can also be demonstrated in the positive perceptions of financial institutions that gained favorable coverage in the media due to meteoric growth but eventually failed afterward.
The term "halo effect" is also used in metal detecting to denote the enhanced ability of a metal item or coin to be detectable when it has been left undisturbed for some period of time in wet soil. The object can leach some metallic properties into the soil, making it more detectable. The area surrounding the object is called its "halo."
History
The halo effect was originally identified in 1907 by the American psychologist Frederick L. Wells. However, it was only officially recognized in 1920 with empirical evidence provided by the psychologist Edward Thorndike. Edward Thorndike was the first to say the halo effect is a specific cognitive bias in which one aspect of the person, brand, product, or institution affects one's thoughts or judgment of the entity's other aspects or dimensions. Thorndike, an early behaviorist, was an important contributor to the study of the psychology of learning. He gave the phenomenon its name in his 1920 article "A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings." In "Constant Error," Thorndike set out to replicate the study in hopes of pinning down the bias that he thought was present in these ratings. Subsequent researchers have studied it in relation to attractiveness and its bearing on the judicial and educational systems. Thorndike originally coined the term referring only to people; however, its use has been greatly expanded, especially in the area of brand marketing.Supporting evidence
In Thorndike's words, "Ratings were apparently affected by a marked tendency to think of the person in general as rather good or rather inferior and to color the judgments of the qualities by this general feeling." In "A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings," Thorndike asked two commanding officers to evaluate their soldiers in terms of physical qualities, intellect, leadership skills, and personal qualities. In Thorndike's study, attractiveness plays an important role in how people tend to consider a person, such as whether a person is friendly or not based on their physical appearance. His goal was to see how the ratings of one characteristic affected other characteristics.Thorndike's study showed how there was too great a correlation in the commanding officers' responses. In his review, he stated, "The correlations are too high and too even. For example, for the three raters next studied the average correlation for physique with intelligence is.31; for physique with leadership,.39; and for physique with character,.28." The ratings of one of the special qualities of an officer often started a trend in the rating results. The halo effect is not an indication of the existence of a correlation, but instead indicates that the correlation is too high. Thorndike used the halo effect to describe both a positive and negative halo.
In 2023, a large study of 2748 participants found that the same individuals received significantly higher ratings of intelligence, trustworthiness, sociability and happiness after having applied a beauty filter. It found a correlation of.30 for intelligence,.20 for trustworthiness,.39 for sociability and.39 for happiness. However, the study also found that beautified men received significantly higher scores to their perceived intelligence compared to women.
Impression Formation
Humans form impressions of other humans quickly and intuitively based on personality traits that they are given. In a seminal study on impression formation, Solomon Asch developed a series of experiments testing his theory that when people are given information about another person's individual traits, these traits will combine or "add up" to create a unified impression. Notably, these individual traits are organized around key/central traits, such as "warm" and "cold", that combine to generate a "radiating" effect on how raters will perceive and interpret the other traits.Participants were given two separate lists of traits describing two fictional people and were identical except for one central trait: if the person was described as also being warm or cold. Asch found that the group of participants who heard a person described as "warm" were perceived as being a positive person and the group of participants who heard a person described as "cold" were perceived as a negative person. This study showed how humans are strongly influenced by the central traits of "warm" and "cold" because a) these central traits may lead one to infer similar traits these central traits may influence the perception of the surrounding traits given.
Asch interpreted these effects in Gestaltian terms: humans engage in holistic formations of impressions that are not simply additive of traits but are integrations of traits that form a unified judgment of another person based on one's expectations. A strong positive or negative trait will shape how individuals perceive all other traits and judgments of another person.