Affective influences on the halo effect in impression formation

Can good or bad moods influence people’s tendency to rely on irrelevant information when forming impressions (halo effects)? On the basis of recent work on affect and cognition, this experiment predicted and found that positive affect increased and negative affect eliminated the halo effect. After an autobiographical mood induction (recalling happy or sad past events), participants (N= 246) read a philosophical essay, with an image of the writer attached, showing either an older man or a young woman (halo manipulation). Judgements of the essay and the writer revealed clear mood and halo effects, as well as a significant mood by halo interaction. Positive affect increased halo effects consistent with the more assimilative, constructive processing style it recruits. Negative affect promoting more accommodative and systematic processing style eliminated halo effects. The relevance of these findings for impression formation in everyday situations is considered, and their implications for recent affect-cognition theories are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For better or for worth, most people’s idea of an academic philosopher is more likely to be a middle-aged bespectacled man rather than a young woman. Whether such expectations have any foundation in reality (and Prof. Summers, ex-President of Harvard University, got into a great deal of trouble by suggesting that they might; Lewin, 2010), they can certainly exert a ‘halo effect’ on how a philosophical essay is evaluated. The halo effect is a cognitive bias whereby the perception of one trait (i.e. a characteristic of a person or object) is influenced by information about another, often irrelevant trait (Forgas & Laham, 2009). An example would be judging a good-looking person as having a more desirable personality (Dion, Berscheid & Walster, 1972) or perhaps inferring that a young woman is less likely to be a competent philosopher than a middle-aged man. Although halo effects have a powerful influence on impression formation in everyday life, such as in job interviews, dating and political judgments, not enough is known about how affective states may impact on the prevalence of halo effects. On the basis of recent affect-cognition theorizing (Bless & Fiedler, 2006; Bower, 1991; Forgas, 2002; Schwarz, 1990), this experiment explored the hypothesis that positive moods may increase and negative moods eliminate the incidence of halo effects because of the different information processing strategies these mood states recruit.