Related experiments of halo effect

Kelly, an American psychologist, did an experiment on two classes of students at MIT. Before class, the experimenter announced to the students that a graduate student would be invited to take the class temporarily. Then tell the students something about the graduate student. Among them, it is enthusiastic, diligent, pragmatic and decisive to introduce graduate students to one class, and the same is true to introduce information to another class, except that "enthusiasm" is replaced by "indifference". The students don't know. The difference between the two introductions is that after class, the students and graduate students in the last class hit it off and talked intimately; The students in the other class are far away from him, coldly saying that they should avoid him. It can be seen that only introducing the differences between words will affect the overall impression. Students wear this colorful mirror to observe the substitute teacher, and graduate students are covered with different colors of aura.

In 1970s, Richard Nisbet, a famous social psychologist, also demonstrated the case of "halo effect". Nisbet and Wilson hope to investigate how students evaluate lecturers (Nisbet and Wilson, 1977). The students were told that this was a study on evaluating teachers. In particular, they were told that the experiment was interested in whether different evaluations depended on the degree of contact between students and lecturers. This is a pure lie. In fact, students are divided into two groups, and they will watch two different videos about the same lecturer. And this lecturer happens to have a strong Belgian accent (which has a lot to do with the laboratory). A group of students looked at the lecturer and answered a series of questions kindly. The second group of students looked at the same lecturer and answered the same question in a cold and distant tone. Experiments have made it clear to us that it is very obvious which personality is more likable. In one personality, the lecturer seems to love teaching and students, while in another personality, he looks more like an authority figure who doesn't like teaching at all.

After watching the video, each group was asked to rate the teacher's appearance, special language habits and even his accent (special language habits are the same in both videos). Consistent with the halo effect, students who see the lecturer's "kind" image think that he is more attractive, his language habits are more pleasing, and even his accent is more attractive. This is not surprising, because it supports the previous research on halo effect.