The Halo Effect In The 1920's

The halo effect was initially portrayed in the 1920s by psychologist Edward Thorndike. It is a sort of cognitive bias in which an observer’s general impression of a person influences how we feel and think about that substance’s character. Also, it works in both positive and negative direction. For instance, if we like one aspect of something, we will have a positive predisposition toward it, and vice versa to if we dislike, we will have a negative predisposition. In addition, the halo effect may be due to simply extrapolation from a general impression with unknown properties. Global evaluation can make assumptions about specific characteristics or affect the interpretation of the meaning; and on the other hand, it also capable of altering
perceptions of generally unambiguous stimuli about which the individual has sufficient information to render a certain judgment. Overall, the purpose of this study is to help us understand and familiarize more with the halo effect phenomenon in social psychology. The study conducted by choosing 118 college students from the University of Michigan who enrolled in introductory psychology as subjects to experiment.
First of all, they will ask to look at two different videotaped interview and then evaluate the teachers on some of the same dimensions employed in the original study. Even though this interview has two different versions, it has the same instructor. Therefore, these students need to watch and make a judgment base on his character. In one interview, the teacher presents himself as a likable teacher, motives, enthusiastic, respectful, and flexible in his teaching. In another interview, he appears to be cold, distrustful, quite, and inflexible. And after viewing these two videotaped, these students will be asked to rate the instructor's likeability. Based on figure 1, we can see that a majority of the subjects in warm condition and warm guise will rate the teacher as appealing, and vice versa with the subjects who in cold condition and cold guide will rate the teacher as irritating. All in all, the results show that a person's global assessment can strongly change the assessment of specific attributes. Besides, they also use another version of the interview which minutes the audio portions to see what the different between these. To more accurate, they also show the subjects the interviews minus the audio portions. It can be assumed that the ratings of the physical appearance of an object on the original object differ only because of the difference in global emotion caused by the audio portion of the interview. As can be seen, the results support the strong interpretation of the halo effect
phenomenon.