The Halo Effect | Hacker News Reader

The Halo Effect

economist.com

41 pointsgruseom11 comments

Cognitive bias is perpetually fascinating -- especially for people who like simulating social agents in silico (I am a member of this set).

For more see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Could you take this idea and use it to boost perceptions of a skill that you're not good at by introducing yourself with some other, completely unrelated skill that you are good at.

Say for example I want to get a job programming Erlang. Now my Erlang isn't very good, and let's say I'm not much of a programmer at all, but I'm an excellent photographer. When I apply for a job, instead of leading with my technical skills, I start with my hobbies and include some really nice 8 X 10 glossies of some of my work. I then talk about my technical skills. If the recruiter is impressed with my artwork, would they see my other short comings in a better light? What do you think - is it worth an experiment or two?

Summary: First impressions are weighted heavily when we form opinions of people. Once those opinions are formed it takes a lot of evidence to the contrary to cause us to re-evaluate our opinion of that person.

It's more general than that. If we form an opinion about X based on feature A, that opinion "leaps" to features B, C, and so on, even if they're unrelated. For example, I've noticed that once people think of a piece of software as fast, they're more likely to regard it as high-quality in other ways that have nothing to do with performance.

Edit: another example is the well-known result that better looking people are rated as smarter, nicer, more competent, etc. IIRC, they're even less likely to get sent to prison and receive lighter sentences if they do.

Dan Areily in "Predictably Irrational" calls this the 'anchor effect.' That an opinion of something is transmitted when linked to something similar.

Starbucks broke an anchor effect by making their stores about ambiance. As a result, customers were willing to spend double the usual price on the same coffee--or of slightly higher quality--because the anchor was broken from Dunkin' Donuts' coffee. It was a different experience and therefore, a different price scale was acceptable to customers.

I haven't read it, but the anchor effect seems a more specific instance of anchoring bias. Essentially when forming a an opinion/solving a problem, we do it by taking an initial value and then modifying it up or down as we see fit. This initial value is whatever we happen to notice first. So unless we get things exactly right in that first estimation, we get things wrong because we fail to revise our beliefs properly.

The best example of this bias is when people are asked to estimate the value of

1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 x 9,

the number they come up with is around ten times lower than when asked to estimate

9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1

So this could also be called a "Dark Cloud" effect.

Did anyone else expect this to have something to do with marketing and the Halo franchise?

Not in The Economist.

I pull HN (and everything else) through Google Reader so I don't see the URL, only the title. Thanks for the down votes tho.

Yes.

How often do you read the word 'Halo' and it isn't referencing the popular game?

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