The Halo Effect Phenomenon Of Edward Thorndike And Solomon Asch

Introduction:

We tend to use whole evaluations to make judgments to specific attributes of individuals (such as attractive or charming) to resolve personality traits (such as kind and open). All of us trait people even though we had never met them and we usually get mistaken with false appearances. Day by day we categorise people by their appearing and are judged in return.
Our first impression of the attractiveness of someone has an effect on how we view that person holistically. This has the name of the halo effect phenomenon and our experiment will be based on previous research from Edward Thorndike and Solomon Asch.

Edward Thorndike was the first that carried out an empirical research on the halo effect published in 1920. There were commanding officers that were asked to rate their soldiers and the researcher

It has been found that attractive people are often more judged as having a desirable personality and better and more attributes than someone of an average appearance.

We wanted to see whether we could replicate on a similar way the experiments stated above in a high school in which the population is multilingual, focusing even more in the bias present in individuals when judging strangers by the western standard of beauty: the symmetrical facial characteristics. So, the aim of this partial replication is to determine whether that symmetry in western societies increases the levels of attractiveness and so the positive traits of an individual.

Null hypothesis: Any differences in the rating of highly attractive (symmetry) and those who are “unattractive" people will be due to chance.

Research hypothesis: The rating of participants given symmetrical faces will be much more positive than that of less symmetrical faces, that will be rated with negative