Halo Effect
In my LUBS module lecture today we discussed a rather interesting social phenomena called the Halo Effect. This is essentially where we make a judgement of people and then no matter what they do or say subsiquently we allow our minds to bend that action so that it still conforms to pigeon-hole we placed the person in when we first made our judgement.
I found this interesting because I see this around me all the time and it goes a long way to explain why friends stick up for one another even when they can be rather nasty to each other on occasion. Its also rather worrying in the sense that by forming a positive opinion and judgement on someone we almost automatically and subconciously allow then to carry out any action in the future and it will immediately be alright by us, or at very least it will immediately be forgivable by us.
Why this is so interesting in a group of friends context is because quite frequently a group of friends will look at the actions of an outsider to the group that they don’t know and condemn it, and yet if they took one look at their own actions to others or even each other, they might surprisingly find that their judgment techniques need a swift review. Certainly food for thought anyway.
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Michelle Said,
October 11, 2006 @ 5:37 pm
Lol, I find that quite funny. I know that I have done it in the past (I know that you have done it in the past as well 😉 ), and it is something that is very natural to us. I think that it is probably to do with the fact that we know all the good things that people close to us do as well as the bad things. I mean, I know I have had people in my life who used to be friends, but we fell out, and when I think of them now, all I think of are the bad things they did, but if I think for a bit longer, I realise that when we were friends there were a lot of good things they also did. Now I am rambelling, but yeah, I think it is all to do with the context people do the bad things in.