What are Halo Effects?
Halo effects are psychological tendencies studied in some detail by the field of cognitive psychology. They occur when one good quality about a person, say, they’re a fan of the same sports team – leads us to over-attribute good qualities to them in other areas. In a school context, students that get an “A” on the first piece of homework they turn in might end up getting undue slack from a teacher on further grading, because the teacher expects them to continue producing A-quality work. The inverse of the halo effect is the “devil effect” or the “horns effect,” where one instance of bad performance causes the victim to be attributed negatively in an unfair fashion in the future. The halo effect is a cognitive bias, one among hundreds, a “mental shortcut” or even “cognitive illusion” that causes people to behave in ways that an unbiased observer empirically and systematically considers unjustified. Because our entire lives are permeated by these cognitive judgments, studies of biases li
Halo effects are psychological tendencies studied in some detail by the field of cognitive psychology. They occur when one good quality about a person, say, they’re a fan of the same sports team – leads us to over-attribute good qualities to them in other areas. In a school context, students that get an “A” on the first piece of homework they turn in might end up getting undue slack from a teacher on further grading, because the teacher expects them to continue producing A-quality work. The inverse of the halo effect is the “devil effect” or the “horns effect,” where one instance of bad performance causes the victim to be attributed negatively in an unfair fashion in the future.
