The halo effect: How attractiveness influences judgment

You must have heard that first impressions are lasting impressions. Not only are first impressions important, but they also spill over to other aspects of personality. That means if you evaluate one trait of a person positively in your first encounter with them, you’re likely to evaluate their other traits positively as well. This is the halo effect. It’s as if having one good quality creates a halo of other positive qualities around them.

The halo effect can occur not only with people but also with brands, things, and even digital interfaces like websites and apps.¹

Table Of Contents

Examples
The power of attractiveness
What causes it?
- All about relationships
Thinking more critically

Examples

When you have a crush on a good-looking person, you may also assume they are intelligent, competent, and kind despite having little or no evidence to believe so.
If the first product you bought from a brand was good, you may assume their customer service will also be good.
You’re also more likely to trust a website that looks good.
If you’re hiring someone, the way they dress might influence your hiring decision. If they’re well-dressed, you might think they’re competent.
When purchasing a food item, you might look at the attractive, enlarged label at the front like ‘fat free’ or ‘high protein’ and you may assume that it has good ingredients.

The power of attractiveness

The halo effect proves that looks matter. How someone looks is typically the first, and sometimes the only, information we can glean from them. So we rush to make judgments about their personality based on that minimal information. Interestingly, the attractiveness halo effect is not the only type of halo effect.(cite) Any positive first impression can spill over even if it doesn’t have anything to do with looks. Let’s call these positive traits that seem to generate the halo effect source traits.

Common source traits:

The halo effect transfers positive judgment from these source traits to branch traits, which are deeper traits that can’t be assessed quickly. Below I’ve listed the 25 traits associated with the ‘attractiveness’ halo effect, based on my research:

What causes it?

The effect is one of many colorful biases that the human mind comes hardwired with. Essentially, it’s a mental shortcut to save mental energy and make quick decisions.(cite) As I said, the branch traits are deep traits that can’t be assessed quickly. So the mind bypasses the deep assessment altogether and relies on the first positive trait it can quickly assess. Then it spills the positivity of that trait to other traits, so it doesn’t have to evaluate each trait separately.

The mind wants to form a general impression and a uniform image of the evaluated person because it likes consistency and avoids cognitive dissonance.⁸ This is why you experience strong expectancy violations when a branch trait you assume, due to the halo effect, doesn’t hold up. When your crush turns out to be a mean person, for example. You’re like:

“How is that possible? How can someone so good-looking be so mean?”

That’s the halo effect talking. There’s no link between personality and attractiveness. (cite)

The same thing happens when you find out that a brand you like has poor customer service. It violates your expectation that everything about the brand must be good. Not necessary.

Food items with labels such as ‘low fat’, ‘sugar-free’ and ‘high protein’ induce the halo effect. These labels are displayed prominently so that when you see them, you assume every other ingredient in the product is good. You’re unlikely to look at the ingredients list. If you do look at that, you’ll see that many of these foods are not healthy.

All about relationships

The reason why the attractiveness halo effect is so powerful comes down to reproductive success. Being attractive means having good genes. That’s a high-status and high-value person. People prefer to form friendships and relationships with attractive people. (cite) Even if they don’t have a mating motive, which is usually the case⁹, the high status of an attractive person can rubs off on them. High-status people tend to have more access to other high-status people and resources. So people naturally pay more attention to them and want to associate with them.

So the halo effect may be the consequence of this strong desire to bond with attractive others.¹⁰ You want to convince yourself they have other good traits as well, so you can pursue them. Think what would happen if the attractiveness halo effect didn’t occur. If instead, you evaluated each trait separately based on data and evidence.

You’d probably find that a lot of good-looking people are lacking in other good qualities. You’d be less motivated to form a relationship with them. But the brain doesn’t want that. It wants you to pursue good genes at all costs. That’s why the halo effect exists.

Thinking more critically

Relationships are rewards for the mind. When we’re motivated by rewards, we’re operating more from the automatic and emotional part of the brain.¹¹. This is why it’s hard to think rationally when it comes to rewards like people and other addictions.

I don’t think you can completely overcome the halo effect and other biases. What you can do is reduce their influence on your decision-making by becoming aware of what’s going on.

When you meet an attractive person, all that you know about them is that they’re attractive. You simply don’t have enough information to judge their deeper traits. If you assume they’re competitive, intelligent, trustworthy, and other branch traits, look for evidence in support of each assumed trait.

When you’re under the grip of the halo effect, confirmation bias takes over, and you only look for evidence that supports your judgments. Try to look for evidence that contradicts them as well. Get comfortable with cognitive dissonance. It’s everywhere.

References

1
Soper, D. S., & Piepkorn, F. (2018). Halo effect contamination in assessments of web interface design. Open Journal of Information Systems (OJIS), 5(1), 1-23. ↩︎
2
Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). The halo effect: Evidence for unconscious alteration of judgments. Journal of personality and social psychology, 35(4), 250. ↩︎
3
Gabrieli, G. (2021). Is the halo effect universal? An investigation of the generalizability and applications of the halo effect (Doctoral dissertation, Nanyang Technological University). ↩︎
4
Batres, C., & Shiramizu, V. (2023). Examining the “attractiveness halo effect” across cultures. Current Psychology, 42(29), 25515-25519. ↩︎
5
Talamas, S. N., Mavor, K. I., & Perrett, D. I. (2016). The influence of intelligence on the endorsement of the intelligence–attractiveness halo. Personality and Individual Differences, 95, 162-167. ↩︎
6
Bak, P. (2010). Sex differences in the attractiveness halo effect in the online dating environment. Journal of business and media psychology, 1(1), 1-7. ↩︎
7
Verhulst, B., Lodge, M., & Lavine, H. (2010). The attractiveness halo: Why some candidates are perceived more favorably than others. Journal of nonverbal behavior, 34(2), 111-117. ↩︎
8
Noor, N., Beram, S., Yuet, F. K. C., Gengatharan, K., & Rasidi, M. S. M. (2023). Bias, halo effect and horn effect: A systematic literature. International Journal of Academic Research in Business & Social Sciences, 13(3), 1116-1140. ↩︎
9
Maestripieri, D., Henry, A., & Nickels, N. (2017). Explaining financial and prosocial biases in favor of attractive people: Interdisciplinary perspectives from economics, social psychology, and evolutionary psychology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40, e19. ↩︎
10
Lemay Jr, E. P., Clark, M. S., & Greenberg, A. (2010). What is beautiful is good because what is beautiful is desired: Physical attractiveness stereotyping as projection of interpersonal goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(3), 339-353. ↩︎
11
Zhang, Y., Zheng, M., & Wang, X. (2016). Effects of facial attractiveness on personality stimuli in an implicit priming task: an ERP study. Neurological research, 38(8), 685-691 ↩︎