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Running head: THE HALO EFFECT: ATTRACTIVENESS INFLUENCING

The Halo Effect: Attractiveness influencing language use

Andrea Griffin

Catawba College

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of Psychology 2222. Experimental

Psychology

04/27/2021

On my honor, I Andrea have not violated the honor code in completing this work.
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THE HALO EFFECT: ATTRACTIVENESS INFLUENCING
Abstract

I examined the role of halo effect on women’s attractiveness and language use to determine if

attractive people use positive affect in their captions. Participants rated pictures of 50 women

shown on PowerPoint slides, the participants had five seconds to rate each picture. The captions

that contained pronouns, positive affect and negative affect were compared to the attractiveness

level of the pictures rated. The attractiveness levels were split into three sections, unattractive,

medium attractive and highly attractive. The results of the study did not support the hypothesis

that attractive people used positive language. I found that highly attractive women used the least

amount of positive affect and the most pronouns in their captions out of the unattractive women

and medium attractive women. Meaning that women who are seen as more attractive are not

positive in their language use.

Key words: attractiveness, language affect, pronouns, negative affect, positive affect
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THE HALO EFFECT: ATTRACTIVENESS INFLUENCING
The Halo Effect: Attractiveness influencing language use

Social media is a platform used for people to make judgments of other individuals

relating assumptions about them from their physical features. These assumptions are explained

by the halo effect, which describes the process of one trait or characteristic influencing

assumptions about other unrelated traits and characteristics of the person (Thorndike, 1920). For

example, if a person has a physically attractive appearance, then they may also be thought to be

positive and happy. Moreover, this process is likely applied in judgments made of others on

social media. The halo effect was named by Thorndike (1920), who explained that we perceive

others based on their salient aspects, which creates unrelated correlations to the person’s other

attributes, such as personality. The reverse also seems to happen and is called the fork tail effect.

So how effective is the halo effect? Do people who are more attractive tend to have more easy

and positive outcomes in everyday interactions, such as dating, social interactions, and how other

people perceive us?

People who tend to be physically attractive have better results in social interactions and more

positive impressions Langlois, Kalanis, Rubenstein, Larson, Monica, and Monica (2000).

Research findings by Dion, Berscheid and Walster (1972) found that in, dating physical,

attractiveness gives a person more of an advantage of in dating, job prestige, marital happiness,

better parenting and social lives. Lorenzo, Biesanz, and Human (2010) examined the halo effect by

determining whether someone with high physical attractiveness was perceived to have other positive

qualities. The people who were found to be more physically attractive were perceived to be

positive and made better impressions on perceivers. Considering the latter, Forgas (2011) also

discuses that impressions, positive and negative, associate with how attractive a person is.
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THE HALO EFFECT: ATTRACTIVENESS INFLUENCING
Men and women tend to have differences when it comes to the halo effect, including how

accurate it is. For example, men do not show the same outcomes from the halo effect, as do

women and tend to have more negative outcomes. An example is the study by Gibson and Gore

(2016) examining the facial attractiveness of men who commit norm violations. Lucker and

Beana (1981) studied the halo effect’s strength with physical attractiveness between men and women.

They presumed that having one salient characteristic would create assumptions that one has all good

qualities. Attractiveness increased the women’s ratings positively for personality, but the men’s

attractiveness did not influence personality ratings, showing that attractiveness-based halo effects

might be unique to women. Ko and Suh (2018) also agree that physical attractiveness and

happiness are not associated the same with men as it does with women. Men prefer their

happiness to be indicated from status and not primarily on physical attractiveness. On the other

hand, research findings by Forgas (2011) state that men writers who were being rated against

women writers were found to be more competent than the women.

Then there is the question of whether people who are physically attractive, really are happy in

their day-to-day lives. This effects more than just day-to-day interactions, women who have high

dating motivation tend to be happier when more physically attractive (Ko and Suh, 2018). Langlois

et al. (2000) examined how facial attractiveness of children and adults affects day-to-day interactions.

Their meta-analysis revealed that those who are physically attractive are happier than less physically

attractive people, believing that the more attractive people are, the more likely they are to receive

positive treatment from common interaction. Attractive people tend to be judged more positively

when seen as physically attractive by others. The children and adults both had the same results,

showing that the more attractive you are, the happier you tend to be and the more positive you appear

to others. Similarly, Gupta, Etcoff, and Jaeger (2016) had participants rate the level of importance of
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THE HALO EFFECT: ATTRACTIVENESS INFLUENCING
their own physical attractiveness. Research findings that the more attractive a person, it is more likely

that person will have more total happiness rather than less attractive people (Dion et al, 1972).

In sum, the halo effect describes how assumptions can be determined based of visual

salient qualities and that attractiveness might be particularly salient factor for women, suggesting

that physically attractive women who are presumed to have salient characteristics like happiness,

are believed to be happier in their day-to-day lives. The purpose of this study is to examine if

physically attractive people are as happy as we presume them to be. I hypothesize that the more

attractive the woman, the more likely she will use language of positive affect and positive

emotion in her Instagram posts indicating she is happier, rather than negative affect suggesting

she is unhappy.

Method

Pretesting and Selection of Stimuli materials

A set of 50 random photos of white women that I obtained through Instagram were used in

the study. The photos are from public accounts and not known to me or the participants. They

were cropped to see only shoulders up. Each of the 50 pictures were placed on a slide in Power

Point and timed to switch every 5 sec. Eight participants, family of experimenter, rated

attractiveness of the photos on a 7-point scale (1) unattractive to (7) highly attractive. The photos

were placed into one of three groups based on these ratings, unattractive, medium attractive, and

highly attractive.

Procedure

After seating participants, I read them the instructions from Appendix A. After consent is

provided, the participants were told they have five s to rate each of the 50 pictures. The sample

of pictures can be found in Appendix B. If the participants missed a picture, they were told they
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could once again see the Power Point. At the end of the experiment, I then debriefed the

participants.

Dependent Measures

I placed the captions from all 50 women in separate documents so the participant would not

see them. The approach used was the Pennebaker, Francis and Booth (2001) Linguistic Inquiry

and Word Count (LIWC) to determine whether attractiveness affected captions in the posts. The

program captured the percentage of language that is positive and negative. Language relating to

positive affect includes words like happy, love, pretty, hope and good, whereas language relating

to negative affect including words like ugly, hate, stupid and sad.

Results

In order to determine if the attractiveness levels influenced language use, a one-way

between subjects ANOVA was used for pronouns, positive affect and negative affect. The means

and standard deviations are located in Table 1. Five analyses were calculated for the one by three

level ANOVA, the first two are overall affect and sad affect. The results show that overall affect

F(2, 47) = .404, MSE = 104.02, p = .670, ηp2 = .017, was not significant. Unattractive women (M

= 18.14) used more affect than medium attractive (M = 15.96) and highly attractive (M = 13.14).

Another analysis of the sad affect was calculated, F(2, 47) = .01, MSE = 1.86, p = .999 and was

not significant. Unattractive women (M = .34), medium attractive women (M = .32), and highly

attractive (M = .32) women used roughly the same amount of sad affect in their captions.

Analyses for positive affect and for negative were also calculated for the ANOVA. The

results of the positive affect was not significant F(2, 47) = .499, MSE = 265.13, p = .610. Highly

attractive women (M = 11.20) used the least amount of positive affect than unattractive women

(M = 16.85), unattractive women had higher numbers than medium attractive (M = 14.25)
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THE HALO EFFECT: ATTRACTIVENESS INFLUENCING
women as well. The results of the negative affect were not significant F(2, 47) = .02, MSE =

11.30, p = .973. Highly attractive women (M = 1.55) did not use more negative emotion in their

captions than medium (M = 1.36) and unattractive women (M = 1.28).

The last analysis for the ANOVA was pronouns and was found significant F(2, 47) =

3.48, MSE = 78.23, p = .039, ηp2 = .129. A post-hoc Tukey test was compared the three means of

using pronouns to each other. The comparisons of means and standard deviations are located in

Figure 1. Highly attractive women (M = 15.99, SD = 10.06) did not use more pronouns than

medium attractive (M = 13.66, SD = 8.62) p = .274 but did with unattractive women (M = 8.07,

SD = 7.58) p = .035, F = .175 who used similar number of pronouns to medium attractive

women.

Discussion

The results of this study revealed highly attractive women use the least amount of

positive affect in their captions out of medium and unattractive women. These findings did not

support our hypothesis. Unattractive women showed to use sadder affect as well in their captions

and unattractive showed to use the most affect overall in their captions. It was found that

unattractive people use the most positive affect in their captions. Highly attractive women do use

the most negative affect in their caption. Although the hypothesis is unsupported, highly

attractive women were found to use the most pronouns in their captions which was significant.

These findings can be differed from the findings of Langlois et al. (2000), who examined

the happiness of attractive people and found them to be happy. Although Langlois et al. (2000) had a

different outcome, their study involved children and adults being observed to determine if their

attractive from how others treat them. Their study also involved rating of attractiveness, like this

study, as well as observation of positive behavior. This is different from this study whereas
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rating was the only measure used. The children and adults were found in Langlois et al. (2000) to

be happier when attractive. The attractive women in this study did not prove to be actually happy

through their captions. Thorndike (1920) also argue that this theory is correct but again the

findings were not as supportive. The findings could be supportive in the aspect that the

unattractive women in this study were shown to use sadder affect in their captions. For instance,

Dion et al. (1972) found that people who were unattractive tend to be less happy than highly

attractive women. In the study by Dion et al (1972), they were particularly looking for

personality judgments and expected life experiences to determine if the pictures used were

attractive. This is similar to this study because captions were used and were compared to the

pictures to determine the affect used. The idea that unattractive people are less happy is shown to

be supportive strongly between this study and the study by Dion et al (1972).

This study implies that attractive people are not necessarily as happy as presumed to be.

As well as learning that unattractive people tend to use happier affect in their captions. There is

also a small difference in sad affect, which shows that unattractive people have sadder affect in

their captions. This information is important because it identifies that happy people are not

actually happy and unattractive people may compensate for their attractiveness. The outcomes

should be examined more to determine mentality issues. For the reasons of why unattractive

people feel they need to make themselves feel compensated. As well as the reason for why

attractive people are not as happy in their language use. Some critiques for the study would be

that there was only one ethnicity, more in the study would provide more reliable answers on

attractiveness. Another is the one scale that was used, more information may be found with other

scales such as personality judgments. In the future, I would provide more scales and make the

pictures used more diverse to understand the results better. Overall, the halo effect concept may
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be correct only in some circumstances but can still identify the difference between the attractive

and unattractive people.

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References

Dion, K., Berscheid, E., & Walster, E. (1972). What is beautiful is good. Journal of Personality

and Social Psychology, 24(3), 285-290. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0033731

Forgas, J. P. (2011). She doesn’t look like a philosopher….? Affect influences on halo effect in

impression formation. European Journal of Social Psychology, 41(7), 812-817.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.842

Gibson, J., & Gore, J. (2016). Is he a hero or weirdo? How norm violations influence the halo

effect. Journal of Gender Issues, 33(4), 299-310. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12147-016-

9173-6

Gupta, D. N., Etcoff, L. N., & Jaeger M. M. (2016). Beauty in mind: the effects of physical

attractiveness on psychological well-being and distress. Journal of Happiness Studies,

17(3), 1313-1325. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10902-015-9644-6

Ko, A., & Suh, M. E. (2018). Does physical attractiveness buy happiness? Women’s mating

motivation and happiness. Journal of Motivation and Emotion, 43(1), 1-11.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11031-018-9717-z

Langlois H. J., Kalanis, L., Rubenstein, J. A., Larson A., Monica, H., & Monica, S. (2000). Maxims

or myths of beauty? A meta-analytic and theoretical review. Psychological bulletin, 126(3),

390-423. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.126.3.390

Lorenzo, G., Biesanz, J., & Human, L. (2010). What is beautiful is good and more accurately understood:

Physical attractiveness and accuracy in first impressions of personality. Psychological Science,

21(12), 1777-1782. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797610388048

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THE HALO EFFECT: ATTRACTIVENESS INFLUENCING
Lucker, G., & Beane, W. (1981). The strength of the halo effect in physical attractiveness

research. The Journal of Psychology Interdisciplinary and Applied, 107(1), 69-75.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1981.9915206

Pennebaker, J. W., Booth, R. J., & Francis, M. E. (2007). Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count:

LIWC [Computer software]. Austin, TX: LIWC.net.

Pennebaker, J. W., Francis, M. E., & Booth, R. J. (2001). Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count

(LIWC): LIWC2001. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Thorndike, E. L. (1920). A constant error in psychological error ratings. Journal of Applied

Psychology, 4, 25-29
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THE HALO EFFECT: ATTRACTIVENESS INFLUENCING
Table 1

Table 1. Means and SDs of affect in captions according to attractiveness

Attractiveness

Unattractive Medium Attractive Highly attractive

(n = 16) (n = 17) (n = 17)

Positive affect 16.86 14.25 11.2

(15.83) (17.1) (15.9)

Negative affect 1.23 1.36 1.55

La
(2.31) (3.19) (4.23)
ng
ua
ge Pronouns 8.07c 13.66b 15.99a
aff (7.58) (8.62) (10.06)
ect
s Sad .34 .32 .32
(1.39) (1.34) (1.34)

Affect 18.14 15.96 13.14

(16.04) (16.58) (15.47)

Note. the means reflect the responses made on a 7-point scale. Means with different subscripts
within each row differ at p <.05