AYYYY! We're back in the Digital Diamond studios for another week! On this episode the Ish Crew was up past their bedtimes to record one of our best episodes yet on The Halo Effect. We go in on Cognitive Dissonance, Social Perception and the effect of positive attraction. Believe it or not, I think we've solved racism as well (ok, we probably haven't, but it was a valiant effort). Sit back and strap in, this one was a gooder.

Wikipedia:

The halo effect is a type of immediate judgement discrepancy, or cognitive bias, where a person making an initial assessment of another person, place, or thing will assume ambiguous information based upon concrete information.[1][2][3] A simplified example of the halo effect is when an individual noticing that the person in the photograph is attractive, well groomed, and properly attired, assumes, using a mental heuristic, that the person in the photograph is a good person based upon the rules of that individual's social concept.[4][5][6] This constant error in judgment is reflective of the individual's preferences, prejudices, ideology, aspirations, and social perception.[3][6][7][8][9] The halo effect is an evaluation by an individual and can affect the perception of a decision, action, idea, business, person, group, entity, or other whenever concrete data is generalized or influences ambiguous information.[10][11][8][12]

The halo effect can also be explained as the behavior (usually unconscious) of using evaluations based on things unrelated, to make judgments about something or someone. The halo effect specifically refers to when this behavior has a positive correlation, such as viewing someone who is attractive as likely to be successful and popular. When this judgement has a negative connotation, such as someone unattractive being more readily blamed for a crime than someone attractive, it is referred to as the horn effect.[13]