

The Halo Effect - gruseom
http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/management/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14299211

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chasingsparks
Cognitive bias is perpetually fascinating -- especially for people who like
simulating social agents in silico (I am a member of this set).

For more see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases>

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petesalty
Could you take this idea and use it to boost perceptions of a skill that
you're not good at by introducing yourself with some other, completely
unrelated skill that you are good at.

Say for example I want to get a job programming Erlang. Now my Erlang isn't
very good, and let's say I'm not much of a programmer at all, but I'm an
excellent photographer. When I apply for a job, instead of leading with my
technical skills, I start with my hobbies and include some really nice 8 X 10
glossies of some of my work. I then talk about my technical skills. If the
recruiter is impressed with my artwork, would they see my other short comings
in a better light? What do you think - is it worth an experiment or two?

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TrevorJ
Summary: First impressions are weighted heavily when we form opinions of
people. Once those opinions are formed it takes a lot of evidence to the
contrary to cause us to re-evaluate our opinion of that person.

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gruseom
It's more general than that. If we form an opinion about X based on feature A,
that opinion "leaps" to features B, C, and so on, even if they're unrelated.
For example, I've noticed that once people think of a piece of software as
fast, they're more likely to regard it as high-quality in other ways that have
nothing to do with performance.

Edit: another example is the well-known result that better looking people are
rated as smarter, nicer, more competent, etc. IIRC, they're even less likely
to get sent to prison and receive lighter sentences if they do.

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HistoryInAction
Dan Areily in "Predictably Irrational" calls this the 'anchor effect.' That an
opinion of something is transmitted when linked to something similar.

Starbucks broke an anchor effect by making their stores about ambiance. As a
result, customers were willing to spend double the usual price on the same
coffee--or of slightly higher quality--because the anchor was broken from
Dunkin' Donuts' coffee. It was a different experience and therefore, a
different price scale was acceptable to customers.

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hegemonicon
I haven't read it, but the anchor effect seems a more specific instance of
anchoring bias. Essentially when forming a an opinion/solving a problem, we do
it by taking an initial value and then modifying it up or down as we see fit.
This initial value is whatever we happen to notice first. So unless we get
things exactly right in that first estimation, we get things wrong because we
fail to revise our beliefs properly.

The best example of this bias is when people are asked to estimate the value
of

1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 x 9,

the number they come up with is around ten times lower than when asked to
estimate

9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1

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wkdown
Did anyone else expect this to have something to do with marketing and the
Halo franchise?

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joubert
Not in The Economist.

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wkdown
I pull HN (and everything else) through Google Reader so I don't see the URL,
only the title. Thanks for the down votes tho.

