Take Off Your Halo
Understanding each other across political divisions.
Posted November 21, 2024 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods
Recently, an unfamiliar coworker stopped me on the quad, using my name. He explained that he knew my wife (who also works on campus) and thought she was the greatest. Another coworker standing nearby agreed, and the three of us briefly bonded over a tremendous shared affection for this woman. In the course of this conversation, the first man and I realized that we had seen each other around for years—years ago—at a downtown gym to which we both belonged. The world is small, and our town is especially so.
Later, I told my wife of the encounter, and how these fellas seemed like good folks, and that I wondered what their political affiliation might be. As the words escaped my mouth, I realized how strange a thing that is to think about, but I’m not sure I’m alone these days in trying to immediately connect values in the form of politics to other aspects of people. I want to write briefly today about why this is often problematic and can be counterproductive.
Clustering of Perceptions
I happen to have some expertise in what I think is a related area. Early in my graduate career , I noticed a quirk in some data I was working with for a new project. Specifically, I kept seeing larger correlations among ratings of Big Five personality traits in certain circumstances. This was noteworthy to me because the Big Five traits are considered to be—and one could argue almost engineered to be—orthogonal, or independent of one another. As such, we wouldn’t expect one’s standing on a given trait to predict one’s standing on another trait. For example, knowing that someone is extraverted should not give any strong clues as to whether or not that person is conscientious.
This is generally true, particularly when you ask people about themselves. When you start asking people about others—as I often do—you can see that traits start clustering. In particular, Agreeableness , Conscientiousness , and Emotional Stability —three broad, distinct personality domains—show stronger correlations in ratings of others than in ratings of oneself (Beer & Watson, 2008). Furthermore, we saw a pattern in our data suggesting that the less acquainted people were, the less we seemed able to distinguish one trait from another. The average intercorrelation among traits seems to increase as our familiarity with the person we are judging decreases. We in the field often refer to the phenomenon of perceiving unrelated attributes as related as a halo effect , the term originating due to what could be called a positive contagion of sorts (e.g., what is beautiful is good; Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972).
Related Issues in Social Psychology
Around the same time I was working on this project, a social psychologist friend (John Chambers) was working on something conceptually similar regarding how people with different political affiliations perceive each other. He was finding that people viewed outgroup members--specifically regarding political issues--through the lens of their own central values in such a way that exaggerated differences:
Partisans seemed oblivious to the possibility that their adversaries shared many of their preferences and values, but differed primarily in how they prioritized those values. Such misperceptions, in turn, may cultivate the very feelings of hostility and mistrust that lead to intergroup conflict in the first place.
(Chambers, Baron, & Inman, 2006)
John chalked this effect up to egocentrism—a tendency to use the self as an anchor in judgments and adjust perceptions simply and uniformly upon encountering information. We started discussing whether egocentric processes might extend to perceptions of personality. If you were an extroverted Democrat, might you assume that a given Republican was introverted? Though we never fully explored this idea, we did replicate the basic halo effect when we asked people to evaluate specific others that they knew to various degrees, as seen below.
I mentioned that John explained his effects as egocentrism. My first explanation for my effects was borrowed more from stereotyping and basic schematic reasoning—when we don’t have a lot of information, we make simpler judgments. As we gain information, others become more complicated, more self-like in this regard. I still think this makes some sense, but another study I conducted showed me an interesting exception. When I gave people one piece of diagnostic information and a photograph of a person they’d never met, that piece of information actually served to strengthen the correlation of trait judgments about that target (Beer, 2012)—the opposite of what a purely informational account of the phenomenon would predict.
Why? Well for one, the diagnostic information was highly valenced in this case—I essentially said “this is a warm and caring person” or “this is not a particularly warm and caring person”. Either type of information had a similarly congealing effect on trait judgments. If you’re nice, you’re responsible, organized, calm, etc. If you’re mean, you’re irresponsible, disorganized, and emotionally volatile. Indeed, when I looked at these relations with respect to how much one liked or disliked a target, the more extreme the like or dislike (either way), the more related one trait judgment became to another.
In real life, we don’t always get information about people in this way, but I think one could argue that we do sometimes—when those guys at work tell someone about my wife, those people will get one piece of information and--perhaps rightfully in this case—assume many other things. What is beautiful is good.
We all know, however, that people are complicated. We know this especially about ourselves, our spouses, our parents and friends, but it’s true of strangers (you know, others’ family members and friends), too. Knowing one thing about a stranger doesn’t tell us everything, and this matters a lot right now, in my opinion. People across the political spectrum can probably agree that our once and future president’s rise to political prominence was built primarily upon anger and grievance. But what is the source of this anger? One possibility a friend and I discussed the other day was that perhaps one source of anger is the feeling of being reviled—unfairly in your mind. Perhaps you’ve experienced it—I know I have. It’s unpleasant, and it could make one develop their own revulsions. If you’ll pardon my nod to vulgarity: “#$% me? No, #$% you !”
To return to my original premise, my concern is that revulsion and its associated simplification—which, in my opinion, is dehumanization—of others can only exacerbate our current issues. John and I had our political differences but were friends. The guy from the gym may not share my opinions on a given core value, but it doesn’t mean we’re different in each and every way people can differ. We probably even share many values. In fact, in another study I conducted many years ago I asked people to list the things they valued most, the overlap across lists was surprising enough to me that it actually complicated the focus of the project, which assumed greater variability in values across people (Beer & Brooks, 2011).
I wondered as I started writing this post about whether if John and I met now, would we be able to be friends? Could I be friends with my coworker were I to discover we recently voted for different people? I hope so. I’ve been reading some of Carl Rogers’s work lately, and I agree that empathy and acceptance of others is paramount. I need to revile less and accept more—attempt to understand the motives and perspectives of others rather than dismissing them out of hand based on a single data point. This does not mean tolerating terrible behavior from others, mind you. It simply means approaching others as if they’re as unique and complicated as I am. Perhaps in doing so, I allow them to reciprocate, and we’re more likely to see our commonalities again. We may never agree about certain central issues, but at least our political and social behavior won’t be based on disdain for a fictional other.
Beer, A. (2012). Increasing differentiation in peer judgments. Talk presented at the 16th European Conference for Personality, Treiste, Italy.
Beer, A., & Brooks, C. (2011). Information quality in personality judgment: The value of personal disclosure. Journal of Research in Personality , 45 , 175-185.
Beer, A., & Watson, D. (2008). Asymmetry in judgments of personality: Others are less differentiated than the self. Journal of Personality , 76 (3), 535-560.
Chambers, J. R., Baron, R. S., & Inman, M. L. (2006). Misperceptions in intergroup conflict: Disagreeing about what we disagree about. Psychological Science , 17 , 38-45.
Dion, K., Berscheid, E., & Walster, E. (1972). What is beautiful is good. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 24 , 285.
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Andrew Beer, Ph.D. , is a Professor of psychology at University of South Carolina Upstate, where he has been the resident personality psychologist since 2007.
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