Beware of the halo, watch out for horn

VITHAL C NADKARNI

FOR all his fame as a philosopher with an inquisitive style, Socrates was physically unattractive. Some psychologists speculate that this could explain why fellow Athenians bumped him off: they forced him to drink hemlock in jail after having been unconsciously repulsed by the philosopher’s crabby troll-like looks! Had he been handsome, the same people might have feted him with wine and cheese at candle-lit public readings! The moral of the story is to watch out for the halo effect, which often tempts us into making extreme, black-andwhite judgements. So if you meet a charismatic fellow, the first impression of his sheer physical appeal might lead you to cast a halo around all his other attributes. According to Harold Kelley’s implicit personality theory, therefore, the first traits that we recognise in other people tend to colour all our later perceptions, if only because of our initial cognitive bias. This explains why celebrities are employed in reel-life to endorse products that they have no reallife expertise in evaluating. Also, why do we need to watch out for the halo effect during recruitment interviews? You could be influenced by one of the attributes and ignore the other weaknesses of the candidate. Conversely, an unfavourable first impression can eclipse even brilliantly positive, but not so immediately apparent attributes. This is the antithesis of the halo effect, the so-called devil effect, or the horns effect, where individuals judged to have a single undesirable trait are subsequently demonised to have many poor traits, allowing a single weak point or negative trait to influence others’ perception of the person in general. That explains why the entry of the physically deformed sage Ashtavakra into King Janaka’s assembly was immediately greeted with derisive laughter from the courtiers. So great was their shock at encountering his eight deformities that it immediately led the courtiers to conclude that the sage was intellectually challenged as well. Ironically, experts say people’s perceptions about their own selves tend to be highly exaggerated — riddled as they are with self-serving biases. The Bible describes it with the parable of a person who was quick to notice a mote in the neighbour’s eye while being blind to the beam in his own! With enlightened persistence, one can be taught to rise above the biases