The halo effect is a cognitive bias in which a person's overall positive impression of someone or something in one area, such as physical attractiveness, spills over and colors judgments of that same person or thing in other, unrelated areas, such as competence or honesty. A corresponding horn effect works the same way in the negative direction. The psychologist Edward Thorndike documented the pattern in 1920, in a study asking military officers to rate their soldiers on physical, intellectual, leadership and character qualities, finding the ratings for unrelated qualities were unexpectedly correlated.
Facts
Core ClaimOne favorable, or unfavorable, trait a person notices in someone else biases their judgment of that person's other, logically unrelated traits. 1 First Described Year Classification
Type of Phenomenon Connections
Associated With
Thorndike's 1920 officer-rating study first documented the effect.
In Branch
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Halo effect
Wikimedia FoundationHistory, supporting evidence section
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.
History section
The halo effect was originally identified in 1907 by the American psychologist Frederick L. Wells (1884-1964).
lead section, phenomenon-kind classification
The halo effect is a cognitive bias in which a person's overall positive impression of someone or something in one area, such as physical attractiveness, spills over and colors judgments of that same person or thing in other, unrelated areas, such as competence or honesty.
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