The halo effect: the nurse who went quiet and the patient who paid for it

A middle-aged man is admitted to hospital with chest pain. The doctor considers him low risk and keeps him on the ward with a monitor. That night, a nurse with more than twenty years of experience sees strange heart rhythms. The next morning she tries to tell the doctor. He cuts her off with a question: “How many cardiac patients have you treated?”

The nurse goes quiet. She also keeps quiet about the most important thing: during the night the patient’s pain had got worse and was spreading up his arm. Hours later, the man suffers a massive cardiac arrest. The resuscitation team takes ten minutes to arrive. He survives, but ends up dependent on life support.

Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro, of the Harvard Negotiation Project, open the chapter on status in Beyond Reason (2005) with this case. What failed was not the medicine. What failed was a mental mechanism psychology has known about for more than a century: the halo effect.

What is the halo effect

The halo effect is the tendency to let an overall impression of someone color our judgment of specific qualities that have nothing to do with it. If a person seems brilliant in one area, we assume they are brilliant in the others too. The halo of one trait lights up everything around it.

The name was coined by psychologist Edward L. Thorndike in 1920, in an article with a rather unpoetic title: “A constant error in psychological ratings.”

What Thorndike found in the army

Thorndike reviewed the ratings US Army officers gave their subordinates. They scored physique, intelligence, leadership and character separately. In theory, these were independent qualities. In practice, the scores were far too similar to one another. The correlations were, in his words, “too high and too even”.

The explanation was simple: the rater formed an overall impression of each soldier, good or bad, and that impression contaminated every box. He saw the same pattern in employee ratings at two large industrial companies.

The halo works without our noticing

Half a century later, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson (1977) showed something more unsettling. They had University of Michigan students watch a recorded interview with a professor who spoke English with a European accent. There were two versions: in one, the professor came across as warm and approachable; in the other, as cold and distant.

Those who saw the warm version rated his appearance, his mannerisms and his accent as appealing. Those who saw the cold one judged those same traits, identical in both recordings, as irritating. And the participants didn’t realize their overall impression had changed those specific ratings: some even believed it was the other way around, that the accent or the mannerisms explained why they liked or disliked the professor.

That is the part that matters most for negotiating: the halo can’t be felt from the inside.

Fisher and Shapiro call it “status spillover”

In negotiation, the most dangerous halo is not beauty or charisma. It is rank. Fisher and Shapiro give it a name of its own: status spillover.

There is a constant risk that the opinions of someone with high status, social or in a particular field, will be given undeserved weight on a subject where that status is irrelevant.

In the hospital, the doctor had the social status of his white coat. The nurse had a different status, more specific and more useful that morning: twenty years of recognizing symptoms and a whole night at that patient’s bedside. The halo of the job title covered up knowledge of the case.

The authors refer to a book on medication errors by Michael Cohen and Neil Davis (1981), which collects cases of people who followed orders from someone of higher rank without questioning them, even when those orders made no sense.

Halo effect examples: from the actor in a white coat to the real estate agent

The book is full of everyday situations where the halo works quietly:

• The actor advertising a medicine. He wears a white coat and has a stethoscope around his neck. He looks like a doctor. He is not one. His acting talent does not turn his opinion into clinical judgment.
• Celebrities with opinions on everything. Very famous people have used their status, the authors write with some irony, to sell their views on everything, from gun control to salad dressing.
• The distinguished customer at Cartier. A woman of high social status may suggest that, because of who she is, she should pay a “fair price” for a diamond necklace. A sensible salesperson does not drop the market price for that. Her status deserves courtesy, not a discount.
• The real estate agent and the mortgage. “Melissa” (a fictional name in the book) finds a house she likes. The agent rushes her (“it won’t be here tomorrow”) and assures her that interest rates are lower than ever. He knows a lot about houses. He is not a mortgage adviser. And he earns a 5% commission if she signs today.

In the last two cases the halo crosses paths with another pressure we already know: artificial urgency, a close cousin of the car dealer trick.

The halo also works in reverse: the horn effect

Thorndike had already put it in writing: the overall impression could be good or bad. If we dislike someone because of one trait, that trait also spills over onto the rest, and we judge their work, their ideas or their intentions more harshly.

This negative version is popularly known as the horn effect, after the horns that would be the flip side of a halo. In a negotiation it is just as damaging: a rough first impression can make us dismiss a reasonable proposal simply because of who brings it.

Why the halo weighs so much when we negotiate

Fisher and Shapiro distinguish two kinds of status, and the difference explains almost everything.

Social status and particular status

Social status is a single, general measure: how much importance or fame society grants us. Particular status is our standing in a specific field: a trade, an experience, an area of knowledge.

What is interesting is that the second kind is spread far more democratically:

Everyone has relatively high status in some particular field, and relatively low status in others.

An unemployed carpenter may know a great deal about how a house is built. A great doctor may have no idea how to keep administrative files. The halo effect appears precisely when we let the first kind of status flatten the second.

Tricks for looking taller

Some negotiators know this and exploit it. The book describes a recognizable piece of staging: they meet you in their office, make you wait ten minutes while they finish with another “important” client, and then sit you in a low chair, looking up at them. None of that changes the facts on the table. It only tries to switch on a halo.

Nobody knows more than you about what you want

Against status spillover, Fisher and Shapiro point out something that tends to be forgotten: in one particular respect, you always have more status than anyone. You are the person in the world who knows most about your feelings, your interests, your needs and your situation.

Their example is a car salesman who leans on his experience: “I’ve worked with lots of families. Almost all of them come back to tell me how much they love this car.” The answer they suggest does not dispute his experience. It acknowledges it and puts it to work for what the buyer knows better than he does: “Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind. Right now it would help me if we explored other options based on what we need: a safe car, with room for camping gear, that’s easy on fuel.”

That move turns the salesman from an adversary into an expert who collaborates. It is the same logic behind knowing your best alternative: power is not always where the halo shines.

The halo in business: when results explain everything

The halo doesn’t only distort what we think of a person. Phil Rosenzweig, a professor at the IMD business school, devoted a whole book, The Halo Effect (2007), to showing how it distorts what people think of companies.

His argument: when a company makes money, the press and many studies describe its strategy as sound, its culture as strong and its CEO as a visionary. When results fall, those same qualities are reinterpreted as arrogance, rigidity or lack of direction, even though the company has barely changed. One of his examples is Cisco, praised for its culture at the height of its boom and criticized for the very same thing after its share price collapsed around 2001.

Rosenzweig argues that this bias also contaminates some management bestsellers that look for “the keys to success” by interviewing companies that have already succeeded: the outcome colors the description of the causes.

In a negotiation, the everyday version is accepting the arguments of someone who represents a famous or successful company simply because of the logo behind them.

Thirty seconds

We come back to the hospital, because the end of the case is the most revealing part. The authors do not blame only the doctor. The nurse, they write, lost sight of her own areas of status, in which she clearly outranked a young doctor who had just arrived. And the doctor fell into “a classic case of status spillover”: he believed his rank made him someone who knew everything.

Their conclusion fits in one line:

The thirty seconds it would have taken to listen to the nurse might have prevented the patient’s heart attack.

Thirty seconds of active listening. That is sometimes all that separates a halo from a tragedy.

If you want to know how you behave when the other side seems to hold more power, our negotiation style quiz is a good place to start.

Sources

• Nisbett, R. E. and Wilson, T. D. (1977). The halo effect: Evidence for unconscious alteration of judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(4), 250-256. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.35.4.250
• Rosenzweig, P. (2007). The Halo Effect… and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers. Free Press.
• Thorndike, E. L. (1920). A constant error in psychological ratings. Journal of Applied Psychology, 4(1), 25-29.
• Fisher, R. and Shapiro, D. (2005). Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate. Viking Penguin. Chapter 6, “Acknowledge Status”, and “Works Consulted” notes.
• Cohen, M. and Davis, N. (1981). Medication Errors: Causes and Prevention. G. F. Stickley. (Cited by Fisher and Shapiro.)