The influence of anticipated choice on the halo effect

Abstract

An experiment tested the hypothesis that individuals faced with making choices about other persons will demonstrate a greater halo effect in their impressions of those persons; that is, there will be a higher intercorrelation of traits attributed to those persons. Male college students ranked photographs, of two different sizes, on a number of desirable traits. They had been told that half of the photographs of each size were of promiscuous girls and that in a later experiment they would choose from among the photographs of one size (the choice set) which were the promiscuous girls. In confirmation of the hypothesis, the intercorrelation of the rankings of the photographs in the choice set was higher than the intercorrelation of rankings of the other photographs.