Abstract
The influence on the global evaluation of a person based on the perception of a single trait is a phenomenon widely investigated in social psychology. Widely regarded as Halo effect, this phenomenon has been studied for more than 100 years now, and findings such as the relationship between aesthetic perception and other personality traits—such as competence and trustworthiness—have since been uncovered. Trustworthiness plays an especially crucial role in individuals' social interactions. Despite the large body of literature published on the Halo effect, and especially on the relationship between aesthetic appearance and perceived trustworthiness, little is known about the overall generalizability of the effect, as almost all of the studies have been conducted on adult participants from Western countries. Moreover, little is known about the stability of the effect over time, in the event of major destabilization, such as the outbreak of a pandemic. In this work, the cross-cultural generalizability of the Halo effect is investigated before and during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic. An analysis of the generalizability and stability over time of the Halo effect is presented. Participants (N = 380, N = 145 Asians, N = 235 Caucasians) have been asked to rate the aesthetic appearance and perceived trustworthiness of a set of human faces of different ages, gender, and ethnicity. Result of our analysis demonstrated that the Halo effect (Aesthetic × trustworthiness) is influenced by the age of presented faces, but not by their gender or ethnicity. Moreover, our results show that the strength of the effect can be affected by external events and that the volatility is higher for adults' than children's faces.
Highlights
The Halo effect (HE) is a cognitive bias in impression formation whereby the general evaluation of individuals’ attributes is based on the evaluation of a single attribute (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977)
The strength of the relationship between aesthetics and trustworthiness is significantly higher (z-test t = 3.626, p-value = 0.000287, Figures 1, 2) for adult (M = 0.53 ± 0.41) than for children faces (M = 0.47 ± 0.46). These results indicate that adults are more likely to estimate the trustworthiness of other adults from their aesthetic appearance, while the estimation is less consistent when it comes to predicting the trustworthiness of children from their appearance
Our results show that the strength of the correlation between the perceived aesthetic and trustworthiness of strangers’ faces is affected by the age of presented faces, but not by their ethnicity or gender
Summary
The Halo effect (HE) is a cognitive bias in impression formation whereby the general evaluation of individuals’ attributes is based on the evaluation of a single attribute (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977). When applied to aesthetic appearance, the HE is observed when the physical appearance is used as a basis for the evaluations of other attributes that are unrelated to appearance whatsoever. A stranger who looks good is perceived as intelligent or smart, even though intelligence and smarts are unrelated to physical attractiveness (Todorov et al, 2009). Generalizability and Stability of the Halo Effect academic fields such as social psychology, computer science, and empirical aesthetics (Hartmann et al, 2008; Todorov et al, 2009; Tuch et al, 2012; Ferrari et al, 2017)
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