How the Halo Effect Bias Distorts Hiring Decisions
How the Halo Effect Bias Distorts Hiring Decisions
The Horns and Halo Effect • The counterintuitive advantages of hiring someone who doesn't look the part
We recently ran an informal experiment1 on Reddit where we posed the following question to the r/Leadership subreddit:
Which Candidate Would You Hire?
You’re hiring for an analyst position. An ideal employee would possess an incisive mind – someone good with numbers and capable of extracting insights from tangled situations. The candidate will not be interacting with clients or the public; they’d spend most of their time basking in the sterile glow of a computer monitor.
You’ve narrowed the field to two candidates. They both have 15 years of experience, an impressive array of technical skills, and stellar reviews from former peers and supervisors. On paper, both seem capable of doing their jobs with distinction. As for the differences:
Candidate 1 boasts an Ivy League education, and shows up to the interview in a tailored suit. He is bespectacled, thin, and cerebral in both mannerisms and appearance. This candidate looks exactly like what you’d expect an analyst to be.
Candidate 2 graduated from some unknown local college you’ve never heard of. He shows up to the interview in a crumpled shirt and a head of hair that resembles a half-built bird’s nest. He is overweight, speaks in a raspy voice, and you glimpsed a tattoo under his shirt-sleeve. This candidate has never been to prison (your HR checked beforehand), but could easily impersonate an ex-convict.
Which of the two would you hire? Please explain your reasoning for your selection in the comments.
Who Would You Hire?
Before we reveal the poll results, think about what you would do in that situation.
We feel a strong affinity toward Candidate #1, and you probably do too. But does your logical reasoning also lead you to a conclusion that matches your instincts? Ours didn’t. We thought about it a little harder and discovered a counterintuitive secret.
Let’s run a thought experiment. Imagine these two events happened at the same time:
Airplane A takes off from airport A and flies toward Airport B.
Airplane B takes off from airport B and flies toward Airport A.
At some point during the flight, both planes pass by each other as they fly in the opposite direction. After exactly 15 hours, Plane A lands at Airport B, and Plane B lands at Airport A. Here’s where it gets interesting: Plane A enjoyed a tailwind by flying in the same direction as the wind, but Plane B had to fly against a headwind the entire trip. Despite the advantage enjoyed by Plane A, both planes landed at their destinations after exactly 15 hours.
Clearly, Plane B has some kind of hidden advantage over Plane A that allowed it to keep pace in spite of the unfavorable wind. Perhaps Plane B has a more powerful engine, is more aerodynamic, possesses a lighter airframe, etc.
Now apply this thought experiment to the hiring scenario from earlier. If Candidate #2 (who looks like an ex-con) managed to build a 15-year career and become as successful as Candidate #1 (who actually looks the part), then #2 had to make up for his Appearance Deficit Hyperhideous Disorder by overcompensating in other areas.
We have no idea how Candidate #2 overcompensated2, but we can qualitatively estimate the extent of the overcompensation: it’s the size of the gap between Candidate #1’s advantage (15-year tailwind) and Candidate #2 disadvantage (15-year headwind). Let’s assume Candidate #1 has always dressed to the nines and Candidate #2 has always looked like a fat slob. Think of how much prejudice the latter must have overcome over a 15-year career, and still end up in the same place as the sharp-dressed Ivy Leaguer.
Armed with this piece of Cerebrium from the Secret Grottos, and the fact that the analyst would not be interacting with clients or the public, we decided that Candidate #2’s overcompensation was weighty enough to tip the balance in his favor.
Who Would Reddit Hire?
After three days of voting, our Reddit pranxperiment resulted in this:
71% of respondents selected Candidate #1. The three most-upvoted comments were also in favor of Candidate #1, but the level of conviction varied widely. Some selected Candidate #1 by a small margin, simply because his appearance tipped the balance in his favor when all else seemed equal. At the other extreme, some commenters were incredulous that anyone would even consider Candidate #2.
We’re told to “never judge a book by its cover,” but most people did exactly that. Let’s investigate deeper.
The Halo and Horns Effect (AKA Halo Effect Bias)
When we ask hiring managers about their selection process, they often talk about their feelings regarding such-and-such candidate compared to the others. This isn’t surprising, because the Interview Mountains are cloaked year-round in the Fog of Uncertainty. Hiring someone necessarily requires you to make a huge decision with incomplete information. You know when someone is “trusting their gut” when they make hiring decisions with vague justifications, like “I don’t think this person will be a good fit for the team” or “I had a good feeling about her from the interview.”
When we rely on our gut, we become vulnerable to biases and fallacies. Hiring Candidate #1 because “he looks the part” is confirmation bias. From the Reddit comments, many poll respondents were influenced by the Halo Effect. In psychology, the Halo Effect is a bias that causes our positive or negative impressions of someone to “spill over” into that person’s other characteristics. Psychological studies show that:
Tall men are perceived to be more capable and assertive. The higher the office on Executive Mountain, the taller the men become.
Attractive people are perceived as being above-average in…just about everything. Ugly people are perceived as being worse than average. This is taken to an extreme in movies, where the heroes are anywhere from cute to “Hollywood Hot”, while villains usually range from homely to “fell off the ugly tree and smacked every branch on the way down with their face.”
Bystanders are more likely to illegally follow a jaywalker across a street if the leader is dressed in a crisp business suit and adorned with a briefcase, than if the leader were dressed sloppily.
In other words, the Halo Effect invites us to jump to conclusions. We prefer the equivalent term “Halo and Horn Effect” because negative impressions can “spill over” as easily as positive ones.
The Horn and Halo Effect at Work in the Reddit Poll
Most respondents to the Reddit poll seemed to acknowledge that the appearances of the two candidates shouldn’t matter when hiring an analyst. Yet, most respondents still picked Candidate #1. Here were some of the reasons given in the comments:
Candidate #1 made an effort to be presentable.
Making an effort signals conformity to social norms. Aligning one’s thought processes to the hivemind is detrimental to the core duties of an analyst position, showing an inability to exercise independent thought. Sure, it would make that person more agreeable to work with, but consider that Candidate #2 had 15 years’ worth of great reviews from peers and supervisors. Any behavioral oddities must have been absent (at best) or tolerable (at worst)3.
Candidate #2's bird-nest hair might smell bad.
Why would Candidate #2 smell bad while #1 does not? Candidate #1 could just as easily commit olfactory sacrilege. What if he applies cologne like a horny teenager applies Axe body spray? Let’s assume neither candidate wore any deodorant or cologne. Who’s more likely to get sweaty and smelly during a stressful interview? Candidate #2, who’s wearing a poorly-fitted, cheap-but-breathable shirt with a low thread count? Or Candidate #1, who’s wearing a tightly-fitted Italian shirt made of heavy fabric that’s hermetically sealed at the top by a silk suffocation device necktie?
Candidate #2 gave off red flags that he would be hard to manage/not a team player
There was nothing in the 15-year work history to suggest this. In fact, we could argue that Candidate #1’s Ivy League education makes him a bigger management risk or a worse team player. What if he treats you and the rest of the team as inferiors because you lack the educational pedigree that he has? But we don’t buy this argument either - it’s just another manifestation of a bias from the Halo Effect. We can thus dismiss both responses to the “who would be harder to manage?” question as equally flimsy.
Candidate #2’s sloppy appearance signals that he’s socially maladjusted.
That’s possible…or it could be a deliberate signal that he refuses to engage in the elaborate interview ritual where both sides cherry-pick and embellish their positives while downplaying the negatives. He could be a practitioner of radical transparency, and refuse to work with anyone who doesn’t practice the same. He could be shrewdly using the interview to gauge whether your organizational culture is more concerned with maintaining appearances and signaling virtue than providing actual value to customers, clients, and stakeholders. But as with the previous response, we can dismiss all arguments as equally speculative. It’s better to focus on the facts: 15 years of work history indicating that social maladjustment is absent or tolerable.
The Reddit comments, plus the upvotes agreeing with them, illustrate the Horns and Halo Effect nicely:
The Horns: our negative impression of Candidate #2’s appearance leads us to presume that he’s flawed in other ways.
The Halo: our positive impression of Candidate #1’s refined appearance and Ivy League diploma causes us to presume he’s flawless in other ways.
Indulging the Halo Effect Bias is a slippery slope. By judging Candidate #2 as a “fat slob,” it becomes easier to imagine him chewing with his mouth open, cutting people off in traffic, and being rude to the wait staff. Meanwhile, seeing Candidate #1 in his sartorial splendor makes it easier to imagine that he’s also a piano virtuoso, runs an orphanage for three-legged puppies in his spare time, and is good in bed.
When To Judge a Book by its Cover
The hypothetical scenario involving Candidates #1 and #2 was for filling an analyst vacancy with no public-facing duties. Would we have made the same choice if we were hiring for a sales, CEO, or diplomat position?
Hell no.
Even if you are not hoodwinked by the Horn and Halo Effect, non-readers of Adventures in Leadership Land will fall for the bias. If you are hiring someone whose job is to sell an appearance regardless of underlying reality, you may be forced to judge a book by its cover — because that’s what everyone else will do. You should only consider hiring someone who doesn’t look the part if you are hiring someone whose job is to create a superior product regardless of its appearance (e.g. analyst, engineer, surgeon).
"Experiment” if you’re feeling charitable. “Prank” if you’re not. Pranxperiment?
It’s possible that Candidate #2 overcompensated in nefarious ways, like being a beneficiary of nepotism or having bribed previous interviewers. However, it’s hard to keep those types of malfeasance secret for 15 straight years and not have them follow you from one job to another. Your HR should be looking out for these kinds of red flags when they screen candidates.
Assuming that the testimonials are accurate, of course. Everyone cherry-picks their references, so Candidate #1’s references are equally suspect as #2’s. You’d either have to consider both sets of testimonials equally, or consider neither.