The Importance Of The Beauty Halo Effect

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The beauty halo effect is the principle that people with good looking are going to have a better life. According to the beauty halo effect, attractive people are automatically attributed with more qualities than unattractive people, they are attributed a notion of talent and are considered as more socially attractable and desirable. This paper is going to define more precisely what the beauty halo effect is. Then it will define what impression formation is and how the attractiveness halo effect can affect the first impression. Finally it will briefly explain what impression management, and finally explain the role of the beauty halo effect in impression formation and management.

The beauty halo effect has become a strong phenomenon in social psychology nowadays. The beauty halo effect can also be called “the physical attractiveness” stereotype and the “what is beautiful is good” principle (Lewis-Beck, Bryman and Liao, 2004). The halo effect makes reference to the tendency of people to better rate attractive people for their personality traits than the individuals that are qualified less attractive (Lewis-Beck, Bryman and Liao, 2004). The psychologist Edward Thorndike first wrote about the halo effect phenomenon in his paper The Constant Error in Psychological Ratings in 1920. He noticed in his work that “ratings were apparently affected by the tendency to think of a person in general as rather good or rather inferior and to color the judgments of the qualities by this general feelings” (Lachman and Bass, 2001). The halo effects explain the fact that early aspects influence the interpretation of later aspects (Forgas, 2011). Since the first definition of the halo effects made by Thorndike in 1920, this concept has been the subject...

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...mpression that others create on them, that is why in order to reach their wanted outcomes individuals will manage their presentation. In any interaction they have with others, people are concerned with they way they are perceived by the other persons (Leary and Allen, 2011). When people want to make a positive first impression they automatically tend to present the aspects of their personality that are the most in accordance with the image they want to provide of themselves (Leary and Allen, 2011). For instance, if a woman has a meeting with her male boss, she may manage her image to look serious, friendly, gentle, humorous and attractive in order to be perceived as competent, hard worker and responsible by her male boss (Leary and Allen, 2011). As beauty halo effect influence a lot the impression formation, it also considerably influences the impression management.

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