What is the halo effect?

Borrowing the halo effect, that is, inviting existing celebrities to host the column, not only can quickly increase the popularity of the column in a short period of time, but the celebrity's own cultural literacy and temperament style also guarantee the quality of the column content. Below is what I have compiled about what the halo effect is, welcome to read. What is the halo effect?

The halo effect, also known as the halo effect, belongs to the category of psychology. It means that after the perceiver forms a good or bad impression of a certain characteristic of a person, he or she will also tend to draw inferences about other characteristics of the person. In essence, it is a cognitive bias that is based on overgeneralization. The halo effect is increasingly used in business management, and its negative impact on organizational management is mainly reflected in various organizational decisions. Halo effect definition

This quality or characteristic of strong perception, like a halo in the form of the moon, diffuses and spreads around, thus covering up other qualities or characteristics, so it is vividly called a halo. effect.

Halo Effect, also known as "halo effect", "stereotype effect", "aperture effect", "halo effect", "point overview effect", is an influence Factors in interpersonal perception refer to the subjective impressions formed in interpersonal perception that are general or partial.

Proposed by: American psychologist H. Kelly

A certain quality of a person or a certain characteristic of an object gives people a very good impression. Under the influence of this impression, people will also give better evaluations to other qualities of the person or other characteristics of the object.

The halo effect, also known as the halo effect, is a factor that affects interpersonal perception. This quality or characteristic of the strong perception of love for the house and the crow is like the halo of the moon, permeating and spreading around, so people vividly call this psychological effect the halo effect. The opposite of the halo effect is the devil effect, that is, having a bad impression of a certain quality of a person or a certain characteristic of an item will make people have a lower evaluation of other qualities of the person or other characteristics of the item. .

Celebrity effect is a typical halo effect.

It is not difficult to find that most of the people who shoot commercials are famous singers and movie stars, and it is rare to see those little-known people. Because products launched by celebrities are more likely to be recognized by everyone. Once a writer becomes famous, the manuscripts that were previously at the bottom of the box will no longer have to be published, and all the works will be sold. This is all due to the halo effect.

The halo effect often occurs between male and female friends. When two loving people are together, they will feel that both parties have advantages and no shortcomings. This means that when you first fall in love with someone, you actually just like a certain aspect of the other person's advantages. Then after the halo effect expands, you feel that the other person has all the advantages.

How can a company make its products understood and accepted by the public? A shortcut is to associate the company's image or products with celebrities and let celebrities promote the company. In this way, the celebrity's "fame" can be used to help companies gather more popularity. Make sure that when people think of the company's products, they think of the celebrities associated with them. Comments on the halo effect

If a person is initially considered good, then other qualities in him will also be considered good, similar to the principle of "love house and bird". It refers to the exaggerated social cognition formed by individuals in the process of admiring and admiring others. The halo effect is most evident in love and idolatry. The origin of the term halo effect

First proposed

The halo effect was first proposed by the famous American psychologist Edward Thorndike in the 1920s. He believes that people's cognition and judgment of people often only start from the part and spread to arrive at the overall impression, that is, they often generalize.

[1] If a person is marked as good, he will be enveloped in a positive and positive aura and given all good qualities; if a person is marked as bad, he will be surrounded by a negative and negative halo. shrouded in a halo and considered to have various bad qualities. This is like the ring (lunar halo) that appears around the moon on the eve of a windy day. In fact, the ring is just an enlargement of the moon's light. Accordingly, Thorndike gave this psychological phenomenon an appropriate name: "halo effect", also known as "halo effect".

Psychologist Dane conducted such an experiment. He asked subjects to look at some photos of very attractive, unattractive, and average people. The subjects were then asked to rate these people on characteristics unrelated to attractiveness. The results showed that the subjects assigned more desirable personality traits to attractive people than to unattractive people, such as being kind, calm, and sociable.

The halo effect is often manifested not only in judging people by their appearance, but also in judging their status and character by their clothing, and judging their talents and moral character by their first words. This effect is particularly evident when evaluating people with whom you are less familiar.

Cognitive perspective

From a cognitive perspective, the halo effect only grasps and bases on the individual characteristics of things, and draws conclusions about the essence or all characteristics of things, which is very one-sided. of. Therefore, in interpersonal communication, we should pay attention to warn ourselves not to be affected by the halo effect of others and fall into the misunderstanding of the halo effect. Experiments related to the halo effect

American psychologist Kelly conducted an experiment with two classes of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before class, the experimenter announced to the students that a graduate student would be temporarily invited to take over the class. Then tell the students some information about the graduate student. Among them, the information introduced to one class of students that this graduate student has qualities such as enthusiasm, diligence, pragmatism, and decisiveness, while the information introduced to another class of students is the same except that "enthusiasm" is replaced by "coldness." And the students don't know. The difference between the two introductions is that after class, the students in the former class hit it off with the graduate student and chatted intimately; the students in the other class stayed away from him and avoided cold conversation. It can be seen that just one word in the introduction can affect the overall impression. The students wore these colored glasses to observe the substitute, and the graduate student was covered with a halo of different colors.

In the 1970s, the famous social psychologist Richard Nisbett also demonstrated the case of the "halo effect". Nisbett and Wilson wanted to investigate how students attending lectures judged the instructor (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977). Students were told that this was a study to evaluate teachers. Specifically, they were told that the experiment was interested in whether different ratings depended on the amount of contact a student had with a given instructor. This is purely a lie. The students were actually divided into two groups, and they watched two different videos of the same instructor. And this lecturer happened to have a strong Belgian accent (this is very relevant to the laboratory). One group of students watched as the lecturer graciously and friendly answered a series of questions. A second group of students watched the same lecturer answer the same question in a cold and distant tone. The experiment makes it clear which personality type is more likable. In one personality the lecturer appears to love teaching and students, while in the other personality he looks more like an authority figure who doesn't enjoy teaching at all.

After each group of students watched the video, they were asked to rate the teacher’s appearance, special language habits, and even his accent (the special language habits were the same in both videos) . Consistent with the halo effect, students who saw the lecturer's affable image rated him as more attractive, his language habits more likeable, and even his accent as more attractive. This is not surprising, as it supports previous research on the halo effect.

Halo Effect Performance Appraisal

In performance appraisal, the halo effect means that an appraiser’s higher evaluation of a certain performance element of the person being appraised will lead to all other performance factors of the person being appraised. On the contrary, if the evaluation of a certain performance factor of the person being appraised is poor, it will lead to his poor evaluation of all other performance factors of the person.

In essence, the halo effect should be a psychological disease of overgeneralization. During the employee performance evaluation process, the evaluator misrepresents certain aspects of the employee's performance or even aspects that have nothing to do with job performance. On the one hand, it takes too much emphasis and uses one characteristic of an employee to infer other characteristics, resulting in "one is good but one is bad", resulting in a biased evaluation bias. The halo effect is most likely to occur when those being appraised are those who are particularly friendly or unfriendly to the appraiser. The psychological causes of the halo effect

The cause of the halo effect is related to one of the characteristics of our perception: integrity. When we perceive objective things, we do not perceive individual attributes or parts of the object of perception in isolation. Instead, we always tend to perceive objects with different attributes and parts as a unified whole. This is because of the nature of the object of perception. Various attributes and parts are organically linked into a composite stimulus. For example, if we close our eyes and only smell the smell of apples, or only touch the shape of apples, we will form a complete impression of apples in our minds, because experience makes up for us other characteristics of apples, such as color (green) red), taste (sweet), touch (smooth), etc. Due to the holistic function of perception, we can perceive objective things quickly and clearly. We can see the whole thing at a glance without having to perceive each individual attribute one by one.

Personality theory

The halo effect on people’s perception also lies in the role of implicit personality theory. There is an inherent connection between some human qualities. For example, enthusiastic people tend to be kind and friendly to others, have a sense of humor, are willing to help others, and are easy to get along with; while "indifferent" people are lonely, old-fashioned, unwilling to ask for help, and more difficult to get along with. In this way, as long as we have a core characteristic of "warmth" or "indifference" for someone, we will naturally complement other related characteristics. In addition, as far as human personality structure is concerned, various personality characteristics are always interconnected and mutually restrictive in each specific person. For example, people who are brave, upright, and not afraid of violence are often frank and courageous in dealing with others, and they are dignified and generous in appearance, sincere and natural. A person who is selfish, bullying, and afraid of the hard will show hypocrisy and insidiousness in other aspects, be inconsistent in his words, flattery, or arrogant and domineering. These characteristics are also reflected in the manner and expression. Therefore, people can not only perceive the inner heart from the appearance, but also generalize from the inner character characteristics to the evaluation of the appearance. This creates a halo effect.

Disadvantages of the halo effect

The biggest disadvantage of the halo effect is that it overgeneralizes. Its characteristics are specifically reflected in the following three aspects:

1. Concealment

Halo effect experiment

Sometimes the individual characteristics of the things we grasp are not It reflects the essence of things, but we are still used to infer the individual to the general, and from the part to the whole, which is bound to erroneously infer other characteristics far-fetched. It is a one-sided mistake to casually note some good or bad characteristics and conclude that this person is either perfect or useless. "Love at first sight" in young people's love is because a certain aspect of the object matches their own aesthetics. They often turn a blind eye to the incompatibility in thoughts, sentiments, characters and other aspects, and feel that the object is "a fairy with a halo". All as expected. Similarly, in daily life, there are countless things that ignore a person's advantages because of a poor impression of him or her.

2. Superficiality

The halo effect often occurs when you don’t know a person deeply, that is, you are still in the stage of feeling and perceiving, so you are susceptible to feeling and perceiving. The surface, locality and selective influence brought about by perception, so that the understanding of someone only focuses on some external characteristics. There is no internal connection between some personality qualities or appearance characteristics, but we easily associate them together, asserting that if there is one characteristic, there must be another characteristic, and we will also cover up the inner essence with the external form. If you look upright in appearance, you may not be a gentleman; if you look smiling, you may not have a kind face and a kind heart. The overall impression produced by simply linking these different qualities is necessarily superficial.

3. Diffusion

The overall attitude towards a person will also affect things related to the specific characteristics of the person. The idioms "love the house and the crow", "hate the monk, hate the cassock" are the manifestations of the halo effect. There is a story told in "Han Feizi? Chapter on Difficulties". Duke Linggong of Wei was very fond of the jester Mi Zixia. One time, Mi Zixia's mother was ill. When he learned about it, he secretly took Wei Linggong's car and rushed home that night. According to the laws of the Wei Kingdom, anyone who steals a ride in the monarch's car will be punished by mutilation (cutting off the feet). But Wei Linggong praised Mi Zixia for being filial to his mother. Another time, Mi Zixia and Duke Linggong of Wei were visiting a peach garden together. He picked a peach and ate it. He felt it was very sweet, so he offered the bitten peach to Duke Linggong of Wei to taste. Duke Linggong of Wei praised him for his love for the king. Later, Mi Zixia became old and faded, and was no longer favored. Wei Linggong no longer liked his appearance but his other qualities. Even the two things he had praised before became Mi Zixia's "crime of deceiving the emperor".

Error

1. It is easy to grasp the individual characteristics of things, and is used to generalizing from the individual to the general, just like a blind man touching an elephant, using points to represent aspects;

2. It affirms everything that is good and denies everything that is bad. This is an absolute tendency dominated by subjective bias.

3. It connects some personality or appearance characteristics that are not intrinsically related, and asserts that there must be another characteristic if there is one.

Overcome shortcomings

Pay attention to the tendency of projection?

Some people always interpret others from the good side, because they themselves have a bodhisattva heart. And some people always judge other people's behavior based on malicious intent. Even if it is a good thing, he will think it is "ulterior motives". This is because he is suspicious. This phenomenon of attaching certain psychological characteristics of oneself to the other party is called "projection tendency". The tendency of projection in interpersonal perception shows that people's perception of others contains their own things. When people reflect others, they often reflect themselves, and this reflection is often unconscious. If you don’t pay attention to your own projection tendencies and don’t regularly reflect on yourself clearly and rationally, you are likely to create a halo effect and various biases.

Attention? First impression?

The intuitive feeling formed after two strangers meet for the first time is called the first impression in psychology. Because it has preconceived characteristics, it is often more profound. If the first impression is good, it will lay a good foundation for future interactions. In this sense, it is necessary to pay attention to making a good first impression. However, the judgment materials provided to you by the first contact are not only very limited, but also often relatively external, and often have a certain degree of falsehood. The seriousness of the problem lies precisely in the fact that, generally speaking, the information obtained first always affects the way of interpreting subsequent information, once the first impression is formed. Later information often only plays the role of supplement and explanation, which is the "hotbed" for the halo effect. Therefore, it is very important to treat the first impression calmly and objectively, and to be mentally prepared to transform or even deny the first impression.

Pay attention to stereotypes?

Pay attention to stereotypes. Stereotyping is the so-called categorization function. People are divided into different types according to their expected types, and then they are labeled and searched according to the picture. .

For example, when talking about teachers, I think of "gentle and polite"; when talking about businessmen, I think of "profit-seeking", and so on. The formation of stereotypes often begins with the classification of common characteristics of a certain type of people. This is a simple understanding. Although it is helpful for a general understanding of a certain group of people, it can also easily lead to bias. Because people's hearts are different, and each person has his own face, and the stereotype is not based on the fact that the person knows the person, sometimes the stereotype is due to the rationalization of prejudice. Therefore, stereotypes and the halo effect can be said to be inextricably linked, and it is a "misunderstanding" that leads to distortion. We must have a precise and profound understanding of others, never forget the rich diversity of people, and constantly correct the illusions caused by stereotypes in our minds.

Avoid judging people by their appearance.

Avoid judging people by their appearance. A psychological experiment shows that when people are asked to identify "good guys" and "criminals" in a pile of photos they do not recognize, they are always affected by the appearance halo effect, that is, they show a tendency to classify based on appearance. . The former Soviet psychologist Bodarev surveyed 72 people on how they understood people's appearance. 9 people answered that a square chin is a sign of strong will, a broad forehead is a sign of wisdom, 3 people thought that thick hair means a stubborn character, 14 people thought that a fat person means a kind heart, and 2 people thought that thick lips It is a sign of honesty and simplicity, etc. The findings are interesting and have some general implications. Although these physical characteristics are relatively fixed or innate, many people still believe that they can tell a person's personality traits. This kind of inference from the outside to the inside contains a lot of bias. For this reason, as long as we are not satisfied with appearances when it comes to understanding others, but pay attention to understanding the deep structure of the other person's psychology and behavior, we can effectively get rid of the influence of the appearance halo effect.

Avoid “circular confirmation”

Psychological research has proven that a person’s prejudice against others is often automatically “confirmed”. For example, if you are suspicious of someone, over time, others will naturally notice it, and the other party will inevitably become disloyal and wary. And the other person's expression of emotion will, in turn, convince you that your original view of him was correct. This is role interaction and two-way feedback in psychology. The emotional deviation of one party leads to the deviation of the other party, which in turn strengthens the degree of deviation of one party. Such a cycle proves that we are bound to fall into deeper and deeper prejudices, enter the maze of halo effect, and forget to return. This reminds us that when you dislike someone or have a prejudice against someone, you should first rationally review whether your attitude and behavior are affected by the halo effect, and consciously get out of the maze of the halo effect.

Getting out of the maze

As the saying goes

It is said: "Knowing others is wise, knowing yourself is wise." In a certain sense, the level of a political cadre depends largely on his ability to know others and himself. We know that the process of perceiving people is different from the process of perceiving objects. People’s perception of themselves and similar species is often destined to be significantly infiltrated and entangled by the subject’s consciousness from the beginning. Therefore, the perception of people is more difficult than the perception of objects, and is more easily affected by subjective factors, resulting in distortion and even illusions. ?The halo effect? ??is one of them.

Confusion

In layman’s terms, it’s a general overview. In the process of getting to know people, people often generalize from a certain characteristic of the other person to a series of other related characteristics. That is, they generalize from the perceived characteristics to the unperceived characteristics, and form from local information. A complete impression, like a halo or moon halo, starts from a central point and gradually spreads outward into larger and larger circles, so it is called a halo or moon halo effect.

As Goethe said: What people see is exactly what they know. ?In daily life, the halo effect often quietly but powerfully affects our perception and evaluation of people. Some leaders see the individual shortcomings of some young officers and soldiers, or are dissatisfied with their living habits and the way they dress after work, so they will regard them as useless.

When you see someone's handwriting well, you think he has a clear mind, is decisive, conscientious, organized, etc. In teaching, a teacher's view of a student's intelligence is likely to be affected by the student's appearance, behavior, family background, and some unrelated things. This bias not only affects teachers' behavior toward students, but ultimately affects students' academic performance. The extreme form of the halo effect is to push people and objects, from loving a certain characteristic of a person to loving him as a whole, and then from loving him as a person to loving everything related to him. This is what is called "Love House and Crow".

Features

The direct result of the negative impact on people’s cognition is prejudice. Bias is based on limited or incorrect sources of information. A person who enters the halo effect maze is bound to have prejudices.

In the process of learning and living, in order to avoid the halo effect affecting other people’s understanding of themselves or their understanding of others, you should pay attention to the following points.

First, do not evaluate new teachers and classmates prematurely. Try to have multi-faceted interactions with teachers and classmates as much as possible to promote in-depth understanding of each other.

Second, pay attention in time to whether you have viewed others comprehensively, especially teachers and classmates who have outstanding advantages or disadvantages.

Thirdly, when interacting with others, don’t care too much about how others evaluate you. Believe that you will be recognized and understood by others.

Fourth, pay attention to doing every little thing you should do, such as homework, composition, duty, etc., and pay special attention to handling things that may have a greater impact on your image.

Fifth, you must dare to show yourself, let more people understand your strengths and strengths, and at the same time, let others understand your shortcomings as much as possible.

Interviewer halo effect

(1) Interviewer’s own preference

For interviewers to evaluate people according to their own preferences, in many companies’ recruitment interviews It happens, but it is most difficult to avoid. For example, the interview examiner attaches great importance to academic qualifications, and he must favor those with higher academic qualifications. Before the interview begins, those with lower academic qualifications will definitely lose one point. Or another interviewer has a background in marketing or sales, and often has a favorable impression of those who are eloquent, but ignores the characteristics and requirements of the position the company is recruiting.

(2) Preconceptions

The so-called preconceptions mean that the interviewer has a relatively fixed impression of the applicant at the beginning of the interview. This impression is difficult to change in a short period of time. For example, if the interviewer's first impression of the applicant is that he is honest and friendly, then when he discovers the applicant's first lie, he will consider it an honest mistake or excessive nervousness, which is forgivable; and if the interviewer An official's first impression of an applicant is one of slickness and hypocrisy, so when they discover the applicant's first lie, they will think it is habitual or intentional, which is unforgivable.

(3) Cover the surface with dots