The Attractiveness Halo Effect

NARRATOR: “…I wanted to applaud when the first plates landed on my table in the salon at Per Se: a lime-marshmallow macaron with the circumference of a nickel, resting in a dish that evoked the lopped-off end of a giant spoon, and a miniature ice-cream cone packed with yuzu curd … wrapped in a napkin with the corners, like lapels, turn down just so.”

These are snippets from a review by New York Times food critic Ligaya Mishan, who ate five courses of dessert, and lived to talk about it. Now, we can roll our eyes at the over-the-top description or scramble to look up what “yuzu curd” even is… but we probably also agree that this dessert is going to taste really, really good.

This idea – that beauty reflects quality or goodness – goes well beyond the Zagat guide.

We apply it to people, too.

The Greek poet Sappho began one of her poems with the thought “What is beautiful is good”. Is this true? If I am beautiful, if you are beautiful, are we actually better? Smarter, kinder, more moral, just… better than we would be if we looked any other way?

My intuition, and perhaps yours, is screaming No! That can’t be.

But according to the science, Sappho got it right … in a way.

Today we’re talking about the Halo Effect – specifically, the attractiveness halo – and how it can put stars in our eyes, but blind us to the truth. Welcome to Outsmarting Human Minds.

Now when we talk about good or bad people, most of us picture adults. But what about children – the little humans that run around playgrounds with sticky fingers and chubby cheeks? Do we think that beautiful children are inherently more “good”?

Psychologist Karen Dion tested this in the 1970s. She gave people a photograph of a 7 year-old and then described that child doing something bad – things ranging from throwing snowballs at another child to throwing rocks at a dog. Then she asked people: What do you think? How “bad” is this child?

Even at this age (second-grade!), looks seemed to matter. Beautiful children were seen as more pleasant and honest than less attractive children doing exactly the same thing.

So Sappho got it half-right. Beautiful people may not actually be kinder or more honest. But we sure see them that way.

This is an example of the Halo Effect: a single positive trait, whether it’s off-the-charts charisma, disarming intellect, or simple good looks becomes a halo. It adds a glow that reflects onto everything else about that person, however unrelated.

So what does this all mean? Would a joke you just heard be funnier coming from a different face? Could this be why everyone liked your idea… but only after an attractive co-worker repeated it? Would we see the new CEO as having less “gravitas” if he were shorter, wider, and had less hair?

The data suggest yes: good looks distort our evaluations. When it comes to work product, you can take the exact same performance, slap a different face to it, and chances are: it will be evaluated differently. When psychologists David Landy and Harold Sigall did these experiments with essays, they found that people thought an essay was better-written and more creative if it was associated with a good-looking writer. And if we zoom into their data, and focus just on the truly terrible essays: these were rated almost twice as high when the author was beautiful.

Of course it’s good to expect the best out of people, but the simple truth is that we don’t give halos to everyone. If we care about the quality of our decisions, we need to find ways to look past the halos around us.

One way to outsmart this blindspot?:

To the extent possible, separate the work from the person. A recent brainstorming session I was in started with everyone jotting down as many ideas as they could on sticky-notes and putting them on the wall. After 15 minutes, we re-grouped in front of this giant collage of ideas and only then began working through them. No faces attached. There are lots of ways to implement this, but the bottom line is simple: find ways to dissociate behavior and ideas from the person.

That way, you’ll see who really shines, halo or not.

Outsmarting Human Minds is a project founded by Mahzarin Banaji, devoted to improving decision-making using insights from psychological science. The OHM Team includes Olivia Kang, Evan Younger, Kirsten Morehouse, and Mahzarin Banaji. Research assistants for this episode are Moshe Poliak, Megan Burns, and Cynthia Shen. Music by Miracles of Modern Science. Support for Outsmarting Human Minds comes from Harvard University, PwC, and Johnson & Johnson. For tests, references, and more: visit outsmartinghumanminds.org.