Halo Effect

Hey everyone!

As a quick summary to give you context for the rest of this, people make quick judgments based on whatever little amount of information is given to them (Nisbett & Ross, 1980). This leads us to create an “evaluation” of a person, which is just a conclusion about whether you like a person based on whatever information processing you do automatically. We interpret later information in light of our evaluation of a person; if we like someone or think they exemplify an important trait, we’re more likely to think of them in a more positive light on other things. This is known as the halo effect (Cooper, 1981).

And that brings me to today’s song.

It’s another Rush song, because there’s just no way I’d pass this one up. It’s called “Halo Effect.” It’s probably going to be the most thematically appropriate song I use all semester.

It’s a sad song from their newest album. It’s about a person who falls in love with someone, and lets that love blind them to the person’s harmful traits. For example, the third verse goes: “What did I care? / Fool that I was / Little by little I burned / Maybe sometimes / There might be a flaw / But how pretty the picture was back then.” The narrator looks back over his time spent with the person and recognizes how he couldn’t see the flaws in the other person. That is more or less the stereotypical example, where you like your romantic partner and so you ignore any warning signs that might come up.

It doesn’t just apply to romance, though, and it also doesn’t have to be positive. You can form an initial negative impression of a person, and then find yourself thinking of everything they do as awful.

For example, I had already lived with someone for a semester and realized that he did not exemplify the traits that I consider important in a person, which led me to not like him a great amount. So when he had some ambiguous behaviors like having his mom call him every morning to make sure he went to class or ranting about how unfair it was that the cop gave him a parking ticket (he never bothered to pick up his prepaid parking sticker), I was a little more likely to interpret them negatively.

On an unrelated note, as a result of a mutual lack of real interest in communicating, we didn’t talk a whole lot. This apparently led to problems one morning when we had a Neuroscience test, because he didn’t know about it. (He was not schematic for responsibility or studying.) So he got there, was handed a test, and knew absolutely nothing on it. After cursing under his breath loudly enough for others to hear, he left to complain to the professor that I didn’t tell him we had a test coming up.

Weirdly enough, he didn’t confront me about it.

Cooper, W. H. (1981). Ubiquitous halo. Psychological Bulletin, 90, 218–224.

Nisbett, R. E., & Ross, L. (1980). Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgment. Englewood Cliff s, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

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