The Halo and Devil Effect: How Our Unconscious Mind Can Affect Our Judgements

Abstract

The Halo and Devil effect proposed by Thorndike (1920) states that when individuals identify one positive trait they will generalise it to a range of other unrelated positive traits, likewise, when a negative trait is identified it will be generalised to a range of unrelated negative traits. This study aims to research into the phenomena with the hypothesis “As participants see a more attractive person, their ratings for that persons’ popularity, intelligence and success will go up, despite these being unrelated characteristics.” To carry out this research a repeated measures design was used where participants were are asked to rate four people from their photos on a four qualities (attractiveness, popularity, intelligence and success). The results show weak support for the Halo and Devil effect as the only significant difference was between perceived success for males and perceived popularity for females. This study concluded that the Halo and Devil effect exists but further research needs to be carried out to examine the extent of it.

Introduction

Thorndike (1920) claimed that when individuals identified one positive trait of an individual they would generalise it to other, unrelated traits of the individual, for example, if a person found an individual attractive, they would automatically assume other positive traits of this person such as intelligence and popularity even though these traits are unrelated and have little bearing on each other (the Halo effect). Thorndike also claimed the opposite happens, that if a negative trait was identified for an individual then they would generalise it to create other, unrelated negative traits, for example, unattractiveness can be generalised to unintelligence and unpopularity.

Nisbett &  Wilson (1977) pioneered research into this field by presenting individuals with one of two videotaped interviews. Half the participants were presented with an interviewer who was cold and distant whilst the other half was presented with the same interviewer but behaving warm and friendly. Following this participants rated the interviewer for appearance, mannerism and his accent, participants who saw the cold and distant rated these attributes as irritating (the Devil effect) whilst those who saw the warm and friendly interviewer rated them as appealing (the Halo effect).

Join now!

This experiment is designed to research further into the Halo and Devil effects and replace the independent variable from Nesbitt & Wilson’s study (the warmness of the interviewer) with the attractiveness of an individual and see whether the Halo and Devil effects are generalisable to a situation when all an individual knows of a person is their attractiveness.

Independent variable: The attractiveness of a picture shown to an individual.

Dependent variable:  The ratings between 1 (lowest) and 5 (highest) participants give on popularity, intelligence and success.

Hypothesis (directional): As participants see a more attractive person, their ratings for that persons’ popularity, intelligence ...

This is a preview of the whole essay