#horn effect

What is the Halo Effect?

The American psychologist Edward Thorndike described a psychological experiment in his 1920 paper, The Constant Error in Psychological Ratings. In this test, some commanding officers of the military department were asked to evaluate the different skills of the soldiers under them. Many of these skills categories included: leadership, physical structure, intelligence, loyalty, dependence, and so on. Thorndike's aim was to investigate how the charge of a particular skill affects the assessment of other features. As it turns out, if the first quality that people notice is positive, then their other qualities will be usually over-evaluated.

Attractiveness

Let me give you an example- When we saw a handsome man, we look at his physical beauty and assume that all the other features of his personality will be positive. We tend to think that the man is intelligent, prudent, and even a good man in principle. Most of the time we don't think that we don't have enough information to decide on these features. In another word, we haven't encountered any event from which we can make this judgment of whether the man is intelligent or morally good. But our brain tends to make decisions before analyzing someone's personality. Thus, we fall prey to a delusion.

We find this illusion in every aspect of our lives: from school to office and marketing campaigns. When this delusion overwhelms our decision-making ability, we lose the ability to think analytically about everything. In this way, it greatly increased the chances of us misjudging others, and for this, we lost many important opportunities in life.

One of the reasons, why the halo effect is created, is that people's social attitudes are a constructive process. When we make an impression on someone, we do not rely on that thematic information. Rather, we create in our mind a reflection of what we already know. However, judging someone's personality by appearance or dress or beauty is really childish. But even then most people can't avoid it. Studies have shown that such external beauties create the easiest halo effect.

If we know about the halo effect, we can control our lives a little more. When judging a person, in any political election we can understand how a positive trait is influencing overall decision making. In this way, we will not be able to completely erase the error, but we will be able to decrease it in many other ways.

One way to avoid the halo effect is to slow down your reasoning process. That means you can't make any judgment quickly. Let's give an example. you have to try to make more than one possible impression on any person. Then you have to question those impressions again and again. Gradually when you will find more information about the person then you can analyze the information to match the impression.

It is easy to avoid the halo effect when it comes to products or brands. If there is any positive impression on a brand, then people want to buy the product of that brand again and again, even if the quality of the product has nothing to do with that impression. So when you go to buy something from the brand of your choice, you have to judge it with extra caution, you have to compare it with other brands. Because the most popular or expensive brand doesn't mean their product is will be the best.

What is the horn Effect?

When the halo effect works in reverse, then it is called the 'Horn effect'. The positive qualities of someone as a result of the hello effect create a good idea about them in our minds as a whole. In the case of the horns effect, one's negative quality creates a completely negative impression about that person to our mind. For example, if someone does not like the look of a product, even if it is the best product in the market, he will show a tendency not to buy it.

"Halo Effect"

"The halo effect (sometimes called the halo error) — a term coined by Edward Thorndike — is the tendency for positive impressions of a person, company, country, brand, or product in one area to positively influence one's opinion or feelings of a person, company, country, brand, or product in another area."

"Horn Effect"

"The horn effect, closely related to the halo effect, is a form of cognitive bias that causes one's perception of another to be unduly influenced by a single negative trait."

I think about Big Mouth a lot. Not to any degree of fondness; when it was announced, the content made me not want to watch it, and the art style is just awful. But the reviews I heard of it from people I trusted point to it being a smart, crude show about growing up and learning to be horny. By all accounts, it was a good show, with little background drama (that I know of) that paid its animators well.

So why does it still get so much hate? I'm sure you could make a lot of arguments about it, but the one I keep coming back to is ugliness.

I think about ugliness a lot, too. I'm a fat guy with what I'd call a "handsome-enough" face, which is to say I don't get looks one way or another. I have complexes about both, wavering from disdain for the way I look to acceptance and even enjoyment, but it tends to waver. Even so I try to acknowledge what I look like, and with acceptance and body neutrality being the goal.

Finally, I listen to a lot of music from people who use avatars to represent themselves when they sing songs. A lot of people use thin, attractive people as the baseline, when in real life they're less so; I won't name names here, but if you've seen a cover of a popular song on Tumblr then you've seen such an avatar. And I've always felt it a missed opportunity, to be fat or short and yet use another tall, thin representation of yourself. I understand the pull of being hot, but changing yourself so immensely makes me think yet more.

All this to say: I think folks at large are really bad at engaging with ugliness on a regular basis. Big Mouth gets regularly shit on for being a dogshit-looking show, but the ugliness is part of regular people learning how to be sexual beings; by all accounts, Haha, You Clowns has an art style nobody likes but material that's almost universally beloved; The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl had a warped art style that fit its comedic tone, but it was bashed for that element that made it work. The insistence from fans for beauty and perfection is something that on the best of days I find immature, and on the worst of days demonstrates an active refusal to understand why things are ugly. And this alongside forgiveness for other series that are likewise ugly, but they grew up with: The Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park are all ugly and unappealing-looking, but they've been a round long enough that they can be forgiven for this sin.

And this comes with the acknowledgement that some things are ugly on accident. Bad art can just be bad art at times: I read a G.I. Joe run in 2016 that started off with art by the incomparable Giannis Milonogiannis, only to swap out in issue #5 for the terrible art of Aaron Conley. You could throw a ball into a Comic Con and hit a plethora of terrible artists who still get work; Rob Liefeld and my enemy John Romita Jr. I have loved the Invincible TV show and I also understand its animation style can sometimes be stiff and cut corners. In pursuit of greatness we sometimes fall short, and though a paid artist is better than an unpaid artist, the art itself falls through. You can even fail at being properly ugly; Velma has moments of great animation between standard bad adult cartoon hijinks, and its art style, meant to complement edgy-yet-realistic jokes about the real world ends up being the bad frosting on a worse cake.

But there are limits. Every so often I come across discourse about I am Not Starfire and I want to tear my eyes out. People complain about the comparisons between the main character, Mandy, and the writer, Mariko Tamaki, saying Tamaki is using the character as a self-insert. These people have not read the book; I don't particularly like it, but even I understand why the book is designed the way it is. Mandy is drawn in an art style that benefits Starfire immensely and is detrimental to Mandy: Starfire is tall, curvy and colorful; Mandy is short, fat and purposefully chooses darker colors and a bad hair style. The Point™️ of the book is that Mandy cannot be her mother and feels insecure when she's not traditionally pretty and standing next to the prettiest woman on Earth. The book is about standing apart from your parent as a means of self-expression, even knowing your parent casts a long shadow. Is it good? No. But the hate the book gets drastically outweighs the actual quality of the book, and the misreading of the themes and intentions of the author, down to the fact that Mandy has a lot of flaws she needs to overcome or redirect. This rant is, in part, inspired by a Reddit post about bad self-inserts and seeing people praise Mordecai from Regular Show who has much the same thematic underpinnings as Mandy.

Though I admit that I have never watched the original Lilo and Stitch movie, I really liked the portrayal of Nani in the live-action remake.

For the most part of the story, we only get to witness her struggles. She is overwhelmed with her life and her responsibility for Lilo. She loses her job and does not succeed in getting a new one. Daily tasks, like cleaning the house, cooking proper meals or paying her bills, pose a challenge to her. She does not even manage to get a medical insurance for herself and her sister on time. The social worker becomes increasingly worried about the circumstances Nani and Lilo live in, and Nani finally has to admit that she cannot fulfill her role as a mother substitute for her sister.

But we also learn that Nani is an excellent surfer. That she was an extraordinary student, who even managed to get a scholarship for a renowned university. In the end, she leaves for California to study Marine Biology.

And I think that it conveys a really important message: that people have more than one side. Someone who only gets to see Nani at her lowest points probably views her as a complete loser who can't get anything right. Someone who only knows her from school or surfing might think that she excels at everything. But neither knows the whole truth. Because a person can be a very succesful in one aspect of their life, and a complete failure in another.

In my opinion, we don't recognize this enough. Since we only get a glimpse of most people, we take the small good or bad bits we have seen from their personality and create a whole image of them based off of it. In psychology, it's called the Halo/Horn effect (cf. this comprehensive article on it).

That's somehow natural, but it can still cause great harm. People who struggle with their daily life are perceived as lazy and irresponsible. They might not get a (good) job, because employers think that they are unreliable and don't give them a chance to show their talents and strengths.

People who are very succesful in certain fields, on the other hand, are regarded as persons who 'have it all', because others can't imagine that their private life could be a mess. That is dangerous especially for individuals with high-functioning depression. Their issues might be overlooked or downplayed and they might be given a higher and higher workload, because they seem to handle it all effortlessly. But everyone has their breaking point.

樂隊花車效應=從眾效應（羊群效應）是一種現象，人們傾向於採用某種行為，信仰或趨勢，因為他們相信許多其他人都在這樣做，而不管他們的個人信仰如何。比喻人都有一種從眾心理，從眾心理很容易導致盲從，而盲從往往會陷入騙局或遭到失敗。

Halo effect is a cognitive bias where a person’s overall impression of someone or something influences their evaluation of specific traits or characteristics.

光環效應： 從一個傑出的個性特徵的感知中，對整個個性進行過度有利的評估的概括。換句話說：當你對一個人的某種品質留下非常好的印象後，在這種印象的影響下，你還會對這個人的其他品質也給予較好的評價。

Horn effect is a cognitive bias where a person’s overall perception of someone or something is negatively influenced by a single negative trait or aspect.