#25 Halo Effect: Why judging a book by its cover is pretty much unavoidable
Why is it that the baddies in cartoons are always so ugly? And why do we assume that handsome people are also going to be charismatic? In this episode, Mel and Dan look at why neat hair and a firm handshake are more important than we could ever imagine.
Mel: 00:19 Hi, and welcome to Bad Decisions.
Dan: 00:21 The podcast that helps us understand why we choose what we choose.
Mel: 00:23 Why we think what we think.
Dan: 00:25 And how to exploit this stuff for fun and commercial gain.
Mel: 00:27 I'm Dr. Mel Weinberg. I'm a performance psychologist.
Dan: 00:30 And I'm Dan Monheit, co-founder of Hardhat.
Mel: 00:42 So Dan, today I would like to introduce you and our listening audience to a man by the name of Edward Thorndike.
Dan: 00:49 Eddie Thorndike.
Mel: 00:50 You can call him Eddie if you like.
Dan: 00:52 That's a good name. Destined for greatness, with a name like that.
Mel: 00:54 Edward Thorndike. So he was an American psychologist, and he was doing a lot of work in the late 1800s, beginning of the 1900s.
Mel: 01:01 He is typically known for his work around the Law of Effect.
Dan: 01:06 Cool. One of my favourite laws.
Mel: 01:09 Simple. One of your favourite laws. The Law of Effect basically states that any behaviour that's followed by pleasant consequences is likely to be repeated, and any behaviour that's followed by unpleasant consequences is likely to be stopped.
Dan: 01:20 Wait. That's a law?
Mel: 01:21 Yep. Back in the late 1800s, this was huge news.
Dan: 01:26 Was this some sort of a gold rush? Like, to be a psychologist in the 1800s, you could say "I'm famous for the first person that called out that if something has a reward at the end people are going to do it more."
Mel: 01:36 Now look, people typically associate-
Dan: 01:38 Wait, wait. No, no, no. I'm not done. "If somebody gets punished for something, they are less likely to do it."
Mel: 01:43 To do it again, yeah.
Dan: 01:44 "People are going to talk about me, saying this 150 years from now."
Mel: 01:47 But as basic as it may seem, this stuff needed research.
Dan: 01:50 Right.
Mel: 01:50 Right? This needed evidence to back it up.
Dan: 01:52 Because who knows? Maybe putting your hand in fire is a thing that you would just repeat over and over again.
Mel: 01:56 So here's what Thorndike did. Thorndike and the Law of Effect was basically the precursor to what we understand as operant conditioning. So people who have done some sort of undergraduate or high school psychology are pretty familiar with the idea of operant conditioning. This is the idea based around reward and punishment that if we reinforce certain behaviours, people will do them again, and if we punish, they won't. It's really important when it comes to parenting. You love parenting, right?
Dan: 02:20 Training animals and training children.
Mel: 02:21 So Thorndike did this, and typically when we think of operant conditioning, people think of Skinner the Skinner box.
Dan: 02:26 The Skinner box, yeah.
Mel: 02:27 The Skinner box. But before that there was the Thorndike box.
Dan: 02:30 What?
Mel: 02:31 Yeah.
Dan: 02:31 Similar thing, just a less catchy name. The Thorndike box. A box of Thorndikes.
Mel: 02:35 Thorndike was putting... Well, it was a box of cats, or single cats, really.
Dan: 02:40 See where Skinner really took this ... Skinner did dogs, right?
Mel: 02:43 No. Pavlov did dogs.
Dan: 02:45 What did Skinner do?
Mel: 02:45 Skinner did pigeons or rats.
Dan: 02:46 Anyway, okay.
Mel: 02:46 Rats pressing leavers. Sorry. So you know, people think of like rats and stats when they think of like-
Dan: 02:53 People think of that?
Mel: 02:55 Sorry. I think of that, and I've been told that when people talk about what first year psychology is about, it's rats and stats. It's basically doing experiments with animals and research methods.
Dan: 03:03 It's not cats and stats?
Mel: 03:03 Well, it was cats and stats when Thorndike was doing stuff.
Dan: 03:07 I'm going to do bats and stats.
Mel: 03:09 You are weird.
Dan: 03:10 Yes.
Mel: 03:10 However, so what Thorndike was doing was putting a cat in a box, and there was a bunch of different things that the cat could essentially play with, or I guess interact with, but just sitting just outside the cat box was a fish. We all know cats want to eat fish.
Dan: 03:25 Like, in a fish bowl?
Mel: 03:26 It was just sitting there. It was like-
Dan: 03:26 It's like a dead fish.
Mel: 03:29 It was a fish that was available for the cat to eat.
Dan: 03:32 Yeah, okay.
Mel: 03:33 Right? Obviously the cat wants to get to the fish, so that provides the motivation to get out of the box. So the cat's interacting with all the things in the box, and it presses the lever. The lever releases a catch. The door opens, the cat gets out, gets the fish, reward.
Dan: 03:46 Boom.
Mel: 03:47 Okay. You put the cat back in the box, doesn't have to play around very much. It quickly figures 'alright I know what I want, I know how to get it. I'll press the lever. Out we go, I get my fish.' So basically Thorndike was showing that the cat can actually learn how to escape by giving it a reward afterwards.
Dan: 04:00 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Mel: 04:01 Once Thorndike had finished playing with all the cats. And the fish. And feeding the fish to the cats. He extended his thinking to wonder how this would apply to people.
Dan: 04:10 He's like "so I finished with the middle of the animal kingdom, and I'm going to straight to the top now."
Mel: 04:14 Straight to the humans, right? And more straight to children. So principles of reward or punishment. So his work has influenced the way that we think about what is good and what is bad.
Dan: 04:23 Right. I mean, it's funny in the way you say it, it sounds like there's this binary kind of worldview that some things lead to good outcomes and some things like to bad outcomes, and that's the end.
Mel: 04:33 Well, pretty much that's how it is when we're little. Like in terms of how much our brain can take on, when we're little, it's helpful for us to think in binary terms, good or bad, right or wrong. That's about the extent to which we can conceptualise things.
Dan: 04:43 Yeah. So I guess if I think about kids' stories or fables or fairytales and things like that, there are always very good characters in those who, you know, are also usually very good looking or handsome or beautiful. Handsome Prince and the beautiful princess. Then there's also bad people.
Mel: 05:02 The bad characters.
Dan: 05:02 Ugly stepsisters or like deformed baddies or, you know, Gargamel.
Gargamel [clip]: 05:07 "I'll get you. I'll get all of you if it's the last thing I ever do!"
Mel: 05:15 Yeah, I remember Gargamel.
Dan: 05:16 You know, they never looked quite right. There's no handsome baddies.
Mel: 05:19 But all we have to think about is the ugly stepsisters and the contrast between the beautiful Cinderella and her ugly stepsisters..
Dan: 05:25 Or He-Man and Skeletor. It's not a fair beauty fight.
Mel: 05:30 So these dichotomies influenced the way that we're taught as children, right? So we're very ingrained to believe that there is good or bad, there is right or wrong, and also that good is associated with other good things.
Dan: 05:42 Yes.
Mel: 05:42 Other things that we perceive as good. Like beauty, like intelligence.
Dan: 05:46 Being funny and generous.
Mel: 05:47 All those sorts of things, right. Bad is associated with being ugly, with being evil, with being nasty.
Dan: 05:54 Stingy.
Mel: 05:54 Selfish. All of those things. So this is where some of Thorndike's more influential work in the field of cognitive biases comes in. Because-
Dan: 06:06 I feel a heuristic coming on.
Mel: 06:08 There is a heuristic coming on.
Dan: 06:09 I feel a Beyonce track coming on.
Mel: 06:10 You do?
Dan: 06:11 Yeah, what do we got?
Mel: 06:12 We got the Halo Effect.
Beyonce [clip]: 06:15 [music]
Mel: 06:26 So the Halo Effect describes the tendency for positive impressions that we have of a person or perhaps a brand to positively influence the opinion that we have about them in other areas. So like what we just said, that if we think that somebody is physically attractive, we're also more likely to think that they're intelligent, that they're funny, that they're just a genuinely, really good person.
Dan: 06:45 Yeah. Which I mean, feels like a weird thing to admit, but I think we all know we've had the experience. Maybe somebody turns up for a job interview or you meet somebody new in a corporate setting, and they're well dressed, and you just therefore assume that they've got a little bit of a headstart in how you think about how they might be able to perform their job. Even though dressing well might have nothing to do with being a great copywriter or a great artist or a great programmer, or even a great salesperson.
Mel: 07:07 Yeah. I mean the halo effect is fundamentally at the origin.... It's where stereotypes start.
Mel: 07:12 Right, we think of one positive thing and then that sort of brings to mind all these other positive things. Or the flip side is that we think of one negative thing and that lights up all these other negative attributes about a person.
Dan: 07:21 It's a dirty halo.
Mel: 07:23 Yeah, well it's actually known as the Horn Effect.
Dan: 07:25 The Horn Effect?
Mel: 07:26 The Horn Effect is the opposite of the Halo Effect.
Dan: 07:28 Right, not like a [horn sound] horn, like a devil.
Mel: 07:31 Like a devil's horn, yeah. That's where it comes from. So may I offer you some research?
Dan: 07:36 You know I love research. Let's do some research.
Mel: 07:43 So Thorndike's 1920 research in which he started talking about the Halo Effect was based on his observations that people were disproportionately rating other people on factors that they didn't know anything about based on limited information. Simply, what he did was he asked commanders in the army to rate their subordinates, so to rate their soldiers basically on different characteristics. He actually specifically asked them to rate them independently on four qualities.
Mel: 08:12 So he asked to rate them on their intelligence, their physique, their character, and their leadership. He specifically said to them, don't let your answers influence each other, you know? Like, I just want you to rate them on their intelligence, not on anything else.
Dan: 08:25 Yeah, so can you just give me those four again?
Mel: 08:26 Intelligence.
Dan: 08:27 Yes.
Mel: 08:27 Physique.
Dan: 08:28 Yes.
Mel: 08:28 Character.
Dan: 08:29 Yep.
Mel: 08:29 And leadership.
Dan: 08:30 Yeah.
Mel: 08:31 Now some of these should be related to each other. Like intelligence and leadership usually go hand in hand. And character and leadership usually go hand in hand. But what Thorndike found was that the correlations between the ratings made by these commanders were way higher than they should have been for things like intelligence and physique.
Dan: 08:49 So, sorry. So what you're saying is if they rated somebody as high, as having good physique, then they also were far more likely to rate them as highly intelligent or highly charismatic or good leaders?
Mel: 08:57 But also, like too intelligent.
Dan: 08:58 Yeah.
Mel: 08:59 Like even more intelligent than they're supposed to be. So their ratings on these four qualities were hugely correlated. Right? To a point that's just not realistic.
Dan: 09:08 When you say she hugely correlated, to the non-doctors amongst us, so I guess what you mean by that is-
Mel: 09:12 They were too strongly associated.
Dan: 09:13 Yeah. So basically somebody came out as high on all four or low on all four?
Mel: 09:17 Pretty much.
Dan: 09:17 When really that should be kind of mixed, right?
Mel: 09:20 So it reminds me of having rose colored glasses that when you see somebody as intelligent, you're also going to see them as attractive and this and this and this. Right? As opposed to what I refer to as crap colored glasses.
Dan: 09:29 Right.
Mel: 09:29 So this is the thought, the Horn Effect. I keep getting horn and Thorndike.
Dan: 09:34 Horndike.
Mel: 09:34 Anyway. Not his name.
Dan: 09:36 No.
Mel: 09:37 But the idea that, when you think something negative about somebody or when something looks crap, everything's just crap.
Dan: 09:44 All right. So Thorndike found out that behaviours that get rewarded get repeated more often than those that don't, and also found out that you really should judge a book... Well, we really do judge a book by its cover.
Mel: 09:54 Yeah.
Dan: 09:54 Pioneering work, Thorndike. So I mean, it's interesting because that intuitively makes sense, and then it's interesting to look at the research. Well, it's interesting for you to look at research and tell me what you found. So if you're rating people and you rate them as good looking, you are naturally going to also give them a headstart in, you think that they're charismatic and competent and...
Mel: 10:13 Yeah.
Dan: 10:13 So from I guess a brands or business perspective, for me, this comes to light in two different ways. One of the first things this makes me think about is 20 years ago when I was working at a Nike factory outlet. I was there at the time when Nike launched a new cushioning technology, which was called Nike Shocks.
Mel: 10:30 Wow, you're old. You're old.
Dan: 10:32 Yeah, very old. So they had these things called Nike Shocks, which they're still kind of around; a lot of them are coming out in retro models now. As opposed to air cushioning, shocks were these kind of, almost like springs. They were like these little mini columns which had some sort of magical gel or something in them.
Dan: 10:49 These things had, if I remember correctly, 16 years of R&D, which is basically half of Nike's life at the time, right? 16 years of R&D had gone into them. Hundreds and millions of dollars in research. When they were released, they came out at the time, an eye water-ingly high price point of $300 for a pair of shoes, which 20 years ago was just insane.
Mel: 11:09 Yeah.
Dan: 11:10 You know how these things sold?
Mel: 11:11 Tell me.
Dan: 11:12 Horrifically.
Mel: 11:13 Right.
Dan: 11:14 In fact, the year that they came out, when Christmas rolled around, every employee in Australia got a free pair of Nike Shocks because they just couldn't clear them. Right? 300 bucks, people just weren't willing to pay for it.
Mel: 11:25 Yeah.
Dan: 11:26 But at the same time as this was happening, the business was selling thousands and thousands of pairs of the $79 cross trainers at Rebel Sport.
Mel: 11:35 Okay.
Dan: 11:36 You know? It sort of really crystallised for me this idea, this was very early on, that what we sell, and what people buy are usually not the same thing.
Mel: 11:44 Right, it's like leakage. It's like a spillover effect.
Dan: 11:46 Exactly. Because if you didn't have the $300 shoes that nobody bought with 16 years and billions of dollars of R&D in it, nobody's interested in buying the $79 cross trainers just to try and get a piece of the same brand that did it.
Mel: 11:57 Yeah.
Dan: 11:58 So what we sell and what people buy are usually not the same thing.
Mel: 12:01 Yeah. So Nike Shocks are like the best marketing fail that ever happened for Nike.
Dan: 12:05 Well, I mean, yeah, I guess you could say that. Like they're one of those things that really cemented at the time people's view of them as a pioneering, innovative technology-first sporting company. Even though in reality if you looked at the direct sales of those shoes, they didn't do very well.
Mel: 12:21 Okay. This plays out in other areas. Like, there are other examples of this throughout.
Dan: 12:25 Yeah, absolutely. So this idea that because the company did one thing great, they do lots of other things great is everywhere. One of the most commonly cited examples is what happened with the iPod. So back in 2004 we got granted the fourth generation iPod, which basically is where iPod went mainstream.
Dan: 12:41 So the fourth generation iPod was the first one with the color screen, and you can have like little pictures on there as well. A lot of people, that was the first iPod that they had. So we were all still using our PC computers mainly. But I've posted-
Mel: 12:54 I don't know about you, I was using CDs for music. No iPods.
Dan: 12:56 Yeah, yeah. Or shitty MP3 players. But the 2004 fourth generation iPod was really the one that kind of went berserk.
Mel: 13:04 Okay.
Dan: 13:04 So a funny thing happened the following year, sales of Apple's computers when up 68%.
Mel: 13:10 Right.
Dan: 13:10 Where they weren't really new computers, but people had seen the iPod and said "holy crap, whatever company made this must be unbelievable."
Mel: 13:17 They're doing some really cool stuff, yeah.
Dan: 13:19 I'm going to go and halo, like take the halo, the shine of the iPod and go and apply it to other things in this company's range.
Mel: 13:24 Yeah.
Dan: 13:25 Same happens with music as well when an artist brings out a new song or a new album, and it does really well, not surprisingly, the back catalog sales usually tend to go up as well.
Mel: 13:34 Right.
Dan: 13:35 Because the Halo Effect says, well the new song's good, so the old stuff must be pretty good as well.
Mel: 13:39 Right, so the Halo Effect is super powerful in marketing.
Dan: 13:42 Yeah, absolutely. So that's one way that it plays out for brands that we have to be mindful that what we sell and what people buy aren't necessarily the same thing.
Mel: 13:49 Yeah.
Dan: 13:49 The other place where I think it plays out is particularly around first impressions because this whole heuristic really is about first impressions count.
Mel: 13:57 For sure, yep.
Dan: 13:58 So when I think about the disproportionate impact first impressions can have. So if you have heard about a brand, you go onto their website, you try to use the search feature on their website, and there's actually some really interesting research, which I won't quote like you would. But trust me, there's research on this that if people try and use a search function on a website, and the search function is crap, you straight away deduce that the whole website is crap.
Mel: 14:22 Yep.
Dan: 14:23 Then by extension that this company is crap.
Mel: 14:24 Yeah.
Dan: 14:25 Right? If you try and call a business to speak to one of their customer service representatives, and they leave you on hold for a long time-
Mel: 14:32 Been there.
Dan: 14:32 Your association is going to be, this business is slow and can't get shit done-
Mel: 14:36 Ineffective.
Dan: 14:36 -is running inefficiently and is running ineffectively and that's my whole view on it. I was thinking about customer on-boarding processes, so if you're letting customers onboard themselves through a website, what the simplicity or difficulty of that says about the company as a whole.
Mel: 14:51 Yeah.
Dan: 14:52 The company that is hard to sign up with is probably going to be a hard company to deal with, and it's probably going to be not that good at actually delivering their core service even though the two probably don't have that much to do with each other.
Mel: 15:02 Yep, and we've talked before about, you know, in the context of how important first impressions are. We've talked before about how we're really simple in the way that we'll take a first impression, and we will generalise that to other aspects.
Dan: 15:13 Yeah.
Mel: 15:14 Of somebody's personality, of other things that they're good or bad. Look, we mentioned at the start about how important that is to us about how ingrained that is; that's the way that we learn things fundamentally.
Dan: 15:22 Because grey is hard. Grey is really hard. Black is easy, white's easy. Grey's like, I don't have time for time for grey.
Mel: 15:27 This is where these shortcuts come from.
Dan: 15:28 Yeah.
Mel: 15:29 From like, basically shortcuts we use because life is hard.
Dan: 15:33 Exactly. So it's not going away, right? Halo Effect is for real.
Mel: 15:36 We're all vulnerable to it.
Dan: 15:38 All vulnerable-
Mel: 15:38 Even if we know that we're vulnerable to it, we're still vulnerable to it.
Dan: 15:41 Exactly. So really what this tells us is that old saying that first impressions count is absolutely true. So we have to be mindful on what other first impressions that we're going to make and knowing that they can have a far bigger impact than we might realise.
Mel: 15:54 Yeah, and then so going back to like the human, you know, just the general day-to-day person experience and what we do, if we're aware of the Halo Effect, it's about the way that we judge people, right? If we're talking about the way that we make impressions of people or the way that we treat other people, it's fundamentally about questioning ourselves and challenging our view of that person, and go, hang on, do I have evidence to actually back up that this is true about a person? Or is this the Halo Effect?
Dan: 16:19 Yeah, and really, where I thought you were going with this is knowing that people are going to judge you on your first impression. Like, just brush your hair. Wear something nice.
Mel: 16:26 Keep it simple.
Dan: 16:27 Have a firm handshake.
Mel: 16:29 Smile.
Dan: 16:29 Look people in the eye. Yeah. It matters. Maybe if you do have negative things about yourself, maybe just hold off until the second meeting when you tell people about them.
Mel: 16:36 Yeah, yeah. Give only positive things on a first date.
Dan: 16:39 Yeah.
Mel: 16:40 No need to tell people too much about yourself too early.
Dan: 16:43 I think that is sound advice.
Mel: 16:46 That's dating advice. Plus marketing advice plus parenting advice. This episode really has it all.
Dan: 16:51 So from a brand perspective, what I think we should do about this, what I encourage my clients, what I encourage other businesses to do is look for your Nike Shocks equivalent, right? Look for your thing that people are going to see from a distance and say, holy crap, even if I don't buy that thing, I want to buy something from the company that made that.
Dan: 17:07 I think there's a saying in the car industry win on Sunday, sell on Monday. You know, so for car manufacturers to make super high powered race cars or crazy concept cars that they're never actually going to move units of, does help move the everyday station wagons and SUVs that mum and dad's going to buy because they want a little piece of that halo magic. I would also say within that, if you're going to think about making something great, really focusing on doing something that is going to make you famous and epitomize what your organisation is all about, you get bonus points if you put it as the first interaction that people are going to have with your brand. Knowing that the earlier on that interaction and that impression is formed, the more important it's going to be for people's long term perceptions of your business or brand.
Mel: 17:47 Sounds good.
Dan: 17:48 So if you're a person, brush your hair. If you're a brand, brush your hair.
Mel: 17:52 Same thing applies.
Dan: 17:53 Yes. All right, is that a wrap on the Halo Effect?
Mel: 17:55 I think that's all we got.
Dan: 17:57 All right, we got to that textbook definition one more time?
Mel: 17:59 Halo Effect is the tendency for positive impressions that we have about a person or a single positive impression to unduly influence other aspects or other things that we think about that person.
Dan: 18:08 Yeah, so if you're a brand, give people a positive thing to have an unduly large impression about.
Mel: 18:12 Sounds good.
Dan: 18:13 If you're a person, do the same thing.
Mel: 18:14 Do the same thing.
Dan: 18:15 Cool. All right. Well, hope you've enjoyed that.
Mel: 18:19 I learned a lot.
Dan: 18:19 I learned a lot.
Mel: 18:20 So everybody must have learnt a lot.
Dan: 18:22 People must also think we're pretty good looking.
Mel: 18:24 Yeah, they'd be right.
Dan: 18:25 And generous.
Mel: 18:26 Yeah.
Dan: 18:27 And funny.
Mel: 18:27 We're hilarious.
Dan: 18:28 Hello.
Mel: 18:29 Don't forget intelligent.
Dan: 18:30 I think we should wind this down.
Mel: 18:31 All right. Thanks for listening, guys. Catch you next time.
Dan: 18:33 Bye.