Assignment Task
Abstract
The paper encompasses what the halo effect is. In the theoretical background, it shows the different pioneers that helped coin the halo effect and how they conducted their research. The main hypothesis is that attractiveness affects how people view others intelligence and kindness and the null is that attractiveness does not influence how people view others intelligence and kindness. The method of collecting data was through a the Qualtrics survey platform (Qualtrics, Provo, UT). Participants saw 24 faces from https://www.chicagofaces.org/, rated beforehand in their attractiveness, from a scale of 1-7 ranging from very unattractive to very attractive. The 24 pictures chosen were from the low end, mid-range and high end of the images in the database, with eight in each group. The tests run on SPSS were the Kruskal Wallis test and One Way Anova, with tests of normality and homogeneity of variances. The results show that there is significant effect of attractiveness and the perception of intelligence. The discussion encompasses on further explanation of the results, with limitation and also benefits of the study.
Keywords: the halo effect, attractiveness, unattractivess, intelligence, kindness.
Introduction.It is in our nature as humans to form opinions about people we come across without even having to communicate with each other. The halo effect is a cognitive bias whereby the first impression of the person effects the judgement of the person’s character. “The halo effect is a cognitive attribution bias as it involves the unfounded application of general judgment to a specific trait” (Bethel, 2010; Ries, 2006). In laymen’s terms, it is judging by appearance, another popular saying is ‘that first impression matters’. “One patent attribute of a certain person leads an observer to draw a generalizing conclusion about that person” (Ellis, 2018). The attractiveness of a person affects how they are viewed overall. For example, is seeing someone with conventionally attractive features, typically when we see these people, we tend to think of them as kind, funny, smart, etc. The classic examples can be seen in Disney princess movies whereby the villains always have some form of ‘ugliness’ about them i.e. tattered clothes, big noses that sometimes have big moles, bulging big eyes, disfigured set of teeth, lack of hair etc., while the princesses and even the princes had conventionally attractive features i.e. big doe-like eyes, bouncy head of hair, slender frames etc. The first person to coin this was Edward Thorndike who was an American psychologist. Thorndike in 1920, asked two commanding officers to evaluate their soldiers in terms of their physical qualities together with their emotional and social qualities. Thorndike discovered that soldiers that were taller and had beautiful traits were described by their commanding officers as having a better character more intelligent, and better leadership skills. More studies have been conducted in various settings concerning this topic. A research done by Landy and Sigall (1974) showed the effect of the halo effect in male judgements of female academic competence, a poorly written and well written paper was given to 60 male undergraduates to assess the quality of the paper, while they were given pictures of the supposed female student. Twenty participants were given the picture of the less attractive female student, while the picture of the more attractive female student was given to another twenty participants, while no pictures were given to the remaining participants left, while half of the participants red the well-written and the other half read the poorly-written paper. The results showed that the participants had assessed the author less positively when she was unattractive and more positively when she was attractive. Moreover, the experiment also showed that the readers tended to tolerate poor performance by attractive females than unattractive ones. In the classroom for instance, teachers seeing a seemingly well-behaved student would assume that the student are diligent in concerns to class work and assignments and gets good scores in tests. Michael G. Efran in 1974 studied the effects of physical attractiveness on jurors and criminals, it was discovered that attractive criminals were more likely to receive lenient sentences than less attractive criminals. This main purpose of this paper to analyze whether attractiveness has an effect when looking at intelligence and kindness of a person, whether the level of a person’s kindness and intelligence is influenced by their attractiveness when being looked at by others.
Method.
Participants:
The full dataset of 412 participants was downloaded. Researcher checks and incomplete data were deleted from the dataset, to create the data for analysis in SPSS. The difference from the full dataset and the ones that was deleted due to incomplete data resulted in 316 participants. Of these participants, 199 identified as female, 110 identified as male, 6 identified as non-binary and one identified as ‘other’. The mean age of these participants was 24.35, the standard deviation was 10.328, and the range was 51. The participants were sampled by convenience, as the survey was sent to mostly people we were close to.
Materials:
The survey used was the Qualtrics (https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/citing-qualtrics/). The dataset was then run with the use of SPSS, with tests of normality, homogeneity of variance, One Way Anova and the Kruskal Wallis test to get the results
Design:
The survey contained twenty-four faces, that had to be rated in their attractiveness from a scale of 1-7, from very unattractive to very attractive and then had to be rated on their levels of kindness, funniness and intelligence, all on a scale of one to five (1-5), i.e. for intelligence the scale will go from very unintelligent, intelligent, neither intelligent or unintelligent, intelligent and very intelligent. The faces in the survey stated their gender (male or female) and their ethnicities (White, Black, Latinx or Asian) with two of each ethnicity and four of each gender to ensure even distribution, with 3 groups (lower, middle, higher ends) containing 8 faces. Images towards low end were rated 1.52-2.14, aged 22-40, images towards the middle rated 3.10-3.15, aged 21-41 and images towards the high end rated 4.12-5.48, aged 20-31
Procedure:
The study consisted of looking at some faces and concluding some short psychological Likert scales on attractiveness, kindness, intelligence and funniness. The survey included a section where one can give consent and was shared through a link. The participation took a maximum of 20 minutes. There were no recognized risks connected with this study
Results.
The number of participants for attractiveness, intelligence and kindness were 316. The mean scores for intelligence are; 2.9470, 3.5898, 3.6594, with standard deviations; 0.5693, 0.4155, and 0.4295 the median is 3, 3.625 and 3.75, all for low, mid and high respectively. The mean values for kindness are 3.2453, 3.2631 and 3.4909, the standard deviation scores are 0.50707, 0.45325 and 0.42860 and the median scores are 3.2500, 3.2500 and 3.5000, all for low, mid and high respectively. The N value is 316 for all. The Kilmogorov Smirnov test of normality statistics scores for intelligence are; .075, .071 and .114 with the significant values as; <.001, <.001, <.001 for low, mid and high. The Shapiro Wilks test of normality statistics scores are .991, .982, .972 with significant values as .041, <.001 and <.001 for low, mid and high respectively. The Kilmogorov Smirnov test of normality statistics scores for kindness are; .087, .102, .075 with p as; <.001, <.001, <.001. The Shapiro Wilks test statistics scores are; .961, .977, .986 with p as; <.001, <.001 and .004 all for low, mid and high respectively. The Levene test of homogeneity of variance statistics score for intelligence is 12.926 with degrees of freedom (2, 945) and p as <.001 and for kindness is 2.416 with degrees of freedom (2, 945) and p as .090. With the values given by the test of homogeneity of variance, two tests were done; The One-way Anova and Kruskal Wallis, this was because, intelligence broke the two assumptions for the test of normality and test of homogeneity while kindness broke only the assumption of normality. As the significant values of both tests has to be .05 and above. Therefore, One-Way Anova was done for Kindness and Kruskal Wallis was done for intelligence. The sum of squares between groups for kindness combined is 11.858, with degrees of freedom as 2 and F-value as 27.523, with significant value as <.001 and the eta-squared point estimate as .055. This shows that although the effect size is small, there is still a significant influence of attraction on kindness. The LSD Post Hoc tests show that there is a difference in p values for low-mid with low-high, mid-high, high-low and high-mid levels of attraction with values of; .630, <.001, <.001, <.001, <.001 respectively, the Dunnet’s tests showing p values for mid-low and high-low levels of attraction as .845 and <.001. These comparisons when there are higher the levels of attraction, there is more significant influence of attraction on kindness. The Student-Newman-Keuls homogenous subsets show that where there are high levels of attraction, there is significant effect on the perception of kindness with p value as 3.4909. The Kruskal Wallis test for intelligence show the N value as 948, the test statistics as 28.229, the degrees of freedom as 2 and p value as .000, thereby telling us to reject the null hypothesis.
Discussion.
The results show that the halo effect on attractiveness has an effect in the perception of intelligence and kindness showing significant values of less than .05 on both the One Way Anova and the Kruskal Wallis test, which further told us to reject the null hypothesis. This further enforces that saying “first impression matters”. The findings of this research have been found to be similar to those of Thorndike and Sigall, whereby people that were seen as attractive were evaluated as more intelligent or that poor performance was tolerated more if the person was attractive, moreover that people that are seen as attractive are less likely to do bad things to others. Although the results confirm our main hypothesis, it is as equally important to discuss limitations to this study. The first limitation is about sample size, although the number of participants were quite much, there would be more benefits for having a larger sample as it provides a much smaller margin of error. The second limitation is about the length of the survey as I received some complaints about the survey being too long, and so participants may have just skimmed through the survey without actually responding truthfully. Thirdly, all three studies are too general and do not exactly tackle the factors affecting how people view attractiveness. For example, the study does not include preconceived notions and stereotypes of the races that influences how people view attractiveness, intelligence and kindness especially with beauty standards basically favoring a particular race of people and then at the same time it does not put into consideration that even though there may be some favorable stereotypes of that race (e.g. Asian people are good at mathematics), it may not still add to their ‘attractiveness’. The study did not also include how a person’s gender and sexuality can influence how they view the people in the pictures attractiveness as it has been researched by Kaplan (1976), that some women were inclined by The Halo Effect on attractiveness only when shown people of the opposite sex. With sexuality it could be that people that attracted to the same sex could be influenced by The Halo Effect when looking at people. Further research is recommended to determine if stereotypes of race and sexuality has an effect on The Halo Effect. The benefits of this study is important in all sectors, be it in healthcare, politics, education, judicial sectors, businesses and so on because The Halo Effect can cause harmful perceptions for example in the healthcare system, there will be downplay of the severity of disorders be it biological or even mental, because of how people assume that because a person is attractive, they do not have as much or a serious problem, phrases like “You look fine, I do not think that you have this disorder, etc.” are common in both the medical field and the mental health field, further denying them the help that they need. In the area of education, people may think that because a person is attractive, they do not struggle to keep up with their studies and have no problem completing tasks. The study of The Halo effect will help teach people to look past the exterior and the actually know the person. It will help those business hiring to discern what people that are actually right for whatever job they are hiring for. In the judicial system, it will lessen the risk of innocent lives imprisoned or even for people that committed those crimes to be dealt with appropriately. In the area of politics, it will help people to be to choose wisely and to actually look at what their candidate stands for and what plans they have for when they assume office and see whether they align with what they also stand for. In the dating culture, for people to actually get to each other and look out for red flags before they decide to get in a relationship.
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