Dependent Measures
After seeing each interview, all subjects were asked,
"How much do you think you would like this
teacher?," and were asked to rate him on an 8-point
scale ranging from "like extremely" to "dislike extremely."
The questionnaire then read: "Listed below
are some characteristics of the teacher you saw.
Please indicate how you think you would feel about
each of the characteristics if you were to take a
course from the teacher" The characteristics included
physical appearance, mannerisms, and for the
Belgian instructor, accent. The subjects rated each
characteristic on the scale below:
— extremely appealing
— very appealing
— somewhat appealing
— slightly appealing
— slightly irritating
— somewhat irritating
— very irritating
— extremely irritating
In addition, 34 subjects were told that the investigators
were interested in knowing "how much, if at
all, your liking for the teacher influenced the ratings
you just made." The subjects indicated their answers
on scales of the following type:
My liking for the teacher caused me to rate his
physical appearance:
much higher
higher
slightly higher
had no effect
slightly lower
lower
much lower
Another 56 subjects were asked to indicate "how
much, if at all, the characteristics you just rated influenced
your liking of the teacher." The subjects
indicated their answers on scales of the following
type:
Physical appearance made me like him:
much more
more
slightly more
had no effect
slightly less
less
much less
After responding to the questionnaire, the subjects
were quizzed intensively about their reactions to the
videotapes and to the questionnaire items, and then
were debriefed.
Results
The results demonstrate that global assessment
of a person can powerfully alter evaluations
of particular attributes. That is, this is
the case if one is willing to make the assumption
that the attributes manifested by the
confederate were in fact constant across experimental
conditions. Although this is a reasonable
assumption, it is by no means indisputable.
It might have been the case, for
example, that the teacher smiled a lot in his
warm guise, thus making his appearance more
appealing and/or frowned a lot in his cold
guise, thus making it less appealing. Similarly,
his mannerisms, both physical and verbal,
might have differed when he was playing the
two roles. It is even conceivable that his accent
might have been less pronounced and
harsh when he was playing the warm role
than when playing the cold role.
In order to demonstrate that the teacher's
physical appearance did not in fact differ
across the two conditions, a follow-up study
was conducted with 34 subjects from the same
introductory psychology pool. These subjects
were shown the interviews minus the audio
portions (purportedly for a study of nonverbal
communication) and were then asked to rate
the physical appearance of the teacher, as well
as his mannerisms. The subjects shown the
warm version rated the teacher's physical appearance
and mannerisms only trivially higher
than the subjects shown the cold version (for
both, t < 1). This indicates that the physical
appearance and nonverbal mannerisms of the
teacher did not in fact differ across conditions.
Thus, it can be assumed that the ratings of
physical appearance for the original subjects
differed solely because of the global affective
difference induced by the audio portion of the
interview.
Awareness of the Influence of
Global Evaluation
The subjects were apparently unaware of
the nature of the influence of global evaluation
on their ratings. Thirty-four of the subjects
were asked if their liking for the teacher
had affected their ratings of his attributes.
Figure 2 presents these subjects' answers to
this question. For ease of presentation, the
data are divided into three categories: (a)
decreased rating (representing 3 scale points),
(b) no effect (representing 1 scale point), and
(c) increased rating (representing 3 scale
points). It may be seen that a majority of
subjects, in both the warm and cold conditions,
believed that their overall liking for
the teacher had not influenced their ratings.
Moreover, for all ratings in both conditions,
as many subjects felt that their overall evaluation
had increased their ratings as believed
it had decreased their ratings. None of the
distributions differs significantly from the
zero, no effect point (all six one-sample ts
not significant).
Fifty-six subjects were asked if their evaluations
of the teacher's appearance, mannerisms,
or accent had affected their liking of the
teacher. Figure 3 presents the results. It may
be seen that the subjects who saw the warm
teacher were divided on the question of
whether the ratings of particular attributes
affected liking. Only for the physical appearance
question did the majority of subjects
express the opinion that appearance had had
no effect on liking. For the other two questions,
approximately equal numbers of subjects
believed that the ratings had increased,
decreased, or had no effect on liking. None of
the three distributions differs significantly
from a mean of zero.
Thus, the subjects appear to have gotten
matters precisely backwards. Their liking for
the teacher was manipulated, and this affected
their ratings of particular attributes. Yet the
subjects did not acknowledge this effect, and
the subjects who saw the cold teacher actually
reported the opposite effect. These subjects
reported that their evaluations of the teacher's
attributes lowered their liking for him, although
they denied that their liking for the
teacher had affected their ratings of his attributes.
(Logically, of course, it is possible that
the subjects who saw the cold teacher are
partly right. It is conceivable that the
teacher's appearance, mannerisms, and accent
were all intrinsically unattractive. In that
event, the subjects who saw the cold teachermight have been accurate when they reported
that their liking for the teacher was decreased
because of their evaluations of these attributes.
If that were the case, then the subjects
in the warm condition erred in believing that
the teacher's appearance, mannerisms, and
accent were neutral and had had no effect on
their liking of him.)
Conversations with the subjects following
the experiment served to reinforce the implications
of Figures 2 and 3. The subjects were
asked if they were quite sure that their global
evaluations had not influenced their ratings of
the teacher's attributes. Most subjects persisted
in their denial—some warily, perhaps
because the}' suspected the experimenter knew
something they didn't, and some heatedly.
One young woman said, in a somewhat exasperated
tone, "Before he even began talking,
I made my judgment about his appearance
and then I stuck with it." The
conversations gave reason to suspect, in fact,
that some of the subjects in Figure 2 who reported
that their liking for the teacher had
influenced their ratings did not actually believe
this. One of the subjects who had indicated
this said, on being probed about his
answer: "Actually, I just turned the question
around I disliked his accent a little, so that
made me dislike him more."
Discussion
The present results support the strong interpretation
of the halo effect phenomenon.
They indicate that global evaluations alter
evaluations of attributes about which the individual
has information fully sufficient to
allow for an independent assessment. These
results, it should be noted, are consistent with
the very earliest theorizing about the phenomenon.
Thorndike (1920), who gave the
phenomenon its name, clearly believed that
it represented far more than an effect on
presumptions about or interpretations of the
evaluative meaning of attributes, but rather
that it represented a fundamental inability
to resist the affective influence of global
evaluation on evaluation of specific attributes.
Subsequent theorists have tended to
share this view, though in the absence of
strong evidence to support it.The layman has probably never doubted
the existence of an inability to separate evaluations
of attributes from global evaluations,
at least at the affective extremes (and so long
as he was referring to the foibles of others).
The strong interpretation of the halo effect is
embedded in such sayings as "love is blind"
and "a face only a mother could love." The
present study, however, suggests that global
evaluations may have a pronounced impact on
evaluations of specific attributes even when
the global evaluations in question are less extreme
than love and hate.
The present results, and those of Landy and
Sigall (1974), also provide prima facie evidence
that people lack awareness of the influence
of one evaluation on another. Indeed,
it would appear that the altered judgments
require the absence of awareness. The subjects
in the present study would surely have
been disconcerted to know that they were incapable
of rendering an independent evaluation
of such characteristics as physical appearance,
mannerisms, and accent. They would
have been disconcerted, that is, if they could
have been persuaded that they had been influenced
by their global evaluation. The subjects
were quite unfazed by the debriefing,
probably because each subject exempted himself
from the accusation that he had been
prone to such an influence. The subjects in
the Landy and Sigall (1974) study would undoubtedly
have been even more horrified if
they could have been convinced that they had
upgraded their evaluations of the essay of an
attractive woman or downgraded their evaluations
of the essay of a plain woman.
But the prima facie case is not the only
one that can be made. The subjects in the
present study were directly quizzed about
their beliefs concerning the nature and direction
of influence. They overwhelmingly reported
that their ratings of particular attributes
had not been affected by their global
evaluations. The subjects who saw the cold
instructor actually believed that the influence
ran in the