baby, I can feel your halo effect

“Everywhere I’m lookin’ now

I’m surrounded by your embrace

Baby, I can see your halo

You know you’re my saving grace

You’re everything I need and more

It’s written all over your face

Baby, I can feel your halo

Pray it won’t fade away”
Beyonce – Halo

Have you ever made excuses for someone you hardly know? It happens in politics a lot. The guy running for congress is pro this, or anti that. They seem to line up with your better sensibilities, so you think, “I like the cut of that guy’s jib.”

And then you find out they sleep around, they lied during the campaign, and they cheat on their taxes. But instead of changing your opinion of them, you make excuses. It’s hard to hear information that goes counter to your current beliefs, because that would lead you to admit something uncomfortable.

You were wrong.

Need an example? Sure, I brought receipts.

Shall I start with elephants or donkeys?

Remember this guy?

Like so many Americans, I met Barack Obama in 2004 when he spoke at the Democratic National Convention.

Goosebumps.

Later, I got to know him on the campaign trail as he ran for president. I freaking loved him. Young, smart, funny, played hoops, had a vision.

But then this came out.

Barack Obama and weed smoking during his youth impacts his halo effect

If you are like me, and your exposure to Obama was hope, it was hard to recalibrate to him smoking that sticky-icky-icky.

I have no issue with people smoking whatever they like, but I still found myself making excuses for the guy. Were Barack and I friends from way back? No. But I still defended him to friends and family.

And this is the halo effect in action. It’s another one of those pesky cognitive biases. The halo effect is a phenomenon whereby people tend to be influenced by their previous judgments. It’s sneaky and can bleed from one area to the next without any rhyme or reason.

The halo effect can appear as a “tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person,” Daniel Kahneman writes, “including things you have not observed.”

Was Obama actually good at hoops? Was he really funny (for a president)? Or was I just feeling that halo from 2004?

On the flip side. If I had known Obama to be an herb smoking – jazz listening – idealist, based on my initial impressions of him, it might have been hard for me to see him in the white house.

Impressions of a person, company, country, or brand, in one area will positively or negatively influence one’s opinion or feelings in other areas.

It’s why I feel so good about buying Costco’s Kirkland Signature version of just about anything. The Costco halo is massive in my house. And for the most part, this halo is helpful for making quick, low impact, decisions. Can’t figure out what laundry detergent to buy? Get that trusty Kirkland Signature and move along with your life.

But sometimes that halo will screw things up for you. You love Nike, they make great shoes and apparel. Then they launch into fitness wearables with the Fuel Band, and they have a really cool viral commercial, so you find yourself with the world’s most expensive pedometer. Nike’s halo had you thinking they were competent in something other than athletic wear. Apparently, computers on your wrist are hard to make.

I had a Fuel Band and wore it on an attempt to summit Mt. Rainier. Between the step count (massive), the temperatures (not warm), and the altitude (quite high), it quit on me. I knew at that point that my Nike halo had a dent in it.

Here is that really cool viral commercial. Casey is a legend.

[Make It Count, Nike Fuel Band launch commercial from Casey Neistat. Excellent.]

You’ve heard that you never get a second chance to make a first impression and that’s mathematically true, but what the hell does it mean?

It means that even something as innocuous as hearing someone is smart before hearing they are a jerk will cast a different halo than hearing they are a jerk before hearing they are smart. After all, that smart guy has reason to be a jerk sometimes, right? Dealing with all these dummies can be intolerable. But that jerk, they just always need to be the smartest guy in the room. So annoying.

See how that works?

Kahneman goes on to say, “Sequence matters, because the halo effect increases the weight of first impressions, sometimes to the point that subsequent information is mostly wasted.”

Sequence of events is a pretty random way to choose how much you love or hate someone, but it’s how our mind works.

Let’s take a look at another President to see this in action.

This is the Donald that millions of Boomers fell in love with during the eighties. Images like this produced a powerful halo of success.

Donald Trump with his halo effect, a rich and famous entrepreneur.

The halo grew larger in the 2000s when The Donald got himself a hit TV show. He got the opportunity to fake fire contestants once a week on NBC. He was growing a successful and powerful halo with all these Boomers. They all knew somewhere deep down that powerful billionaire types are not typically working as the host of a reality TV show, but the halo provides cover. They think, “he is doing it to educate the public and raise money for charities.”

Donald Trump and his growing Celebrity Apprentice halo

That halo made it really hard for people to see what was really going on. Still today people come to his defense over things they clearly wouldn’t condone in other areas of life, like cheating and lying.

They make excuses for him. The halo tells you this guy is a great businessman, and you’ll proclaim crazy things like, “he never went bankrupt, those were his businesses” as though those things are not interrelated.

And as we mentioned earlier, because the halo is impacted by order of events, order of impression, and because it also bleeds into other seemingly unrelated areas, the success and power halos are enough to think, “this guy would crush it in the white house.”

Just to even the political score for all the halos out there that are feeling attacked, I’ll point out that, Clinton cheated with Monica but the balanced budget and booming economy acted as a tremendous halo. Oh, the saxophone too.

Bush lied about WMD in Iraq, but that 9/11 halo was undeniable.

Again, goosebumps.

This is how we operate, and it’s not just with Costco and politics.

I did it with this guy. No doubt in my mind he was all natural.

And when the truth came out, I made excuses. I said, “It was just for recovery. It wasn’t illegal at the time.”

(For those that don’t follow baseball, Mark McGwire went from large to extra-extra-large using Androsten.)

How about that kid in the neighborhood, the one you know is trouble, but their parents think they are a perfect angel.

The list goes on.

I’m hoping you can see what the halo effect is and understand that there is a 99.9% likelihood that it is impacting you. And as they say in recovery, the first step is admitting you have a problem. Awareness is key in managing the halo effect.

The second step is to be systematic in our thinking. The halo effect will lead you to make quick decisions based on earlier perceptions. As I mentioned with the Costco example, this can be a good thing. But for larger more impactful decisions, like the leader of the free world, you need to slow things down and manage the halo effect. Remind yourself to take some time and think things through.

Who to hire, where to work, what to invest in, these are topics that should take some thoughtful consideration rather than just going with your “gut.”

The old Pro’s & Con’s list is a good start. It slows down your thinking. You get to visually see that “tall and good looking” are being canceled out by “unfriendly and unemployed.”

Identifying the criteria that is important before you start reviewing options can help as well, either for a new dryer or a new hire.

At the office, Kahneman offers some advice for running meetings. “Before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.”

And who is most likely to speak early and assertively? The boss. No wonder nothing changes around here!

Contrast Kahneman’s advice with the popular Amazon methodology whereby the committee head is asked to write a six-page memo summarizing the relevant points of the meeting. While I appreciate the practice to promote clear thinking, it seems to me that a six-page narrative from a single member of the committee could introduce quite a halo for them and their ideas. They can thoughtfully state the case for their ideas before other members of the meeting have fully thought through their own.

An upgrade to this process would be to write that memo, but before other members of the meeting read it in its entirety, the subject matter is introduced along with time for members to think through their own opinions on it.

Ed Catmull has a suggestion that can help your team do more than simply follow the leader. Catmull was on the Rich Roll Podcast where he said, at Pixar “we learned if a person with a powerful voice started the discussion, that it distorted the room.” This is the halo effect, and depending on how powerful, or how large the halo, they used a different strategy. Often times it was sufficient for the “person with power to shut up for the first 15 minutes, and then enter the discussion, because if they enter, that is entirely different than setting the tone.” That shift in the order of operations allowed the other members to think for themselves. But sometimes a halo is too much to overcome, as was the case with Pixar board member Steve Jobs, who Catmull eventually asked “to stop coming all together.”

Jeff Bezos agrees. He said, “I always speak last. And I know from experience that if I speak first, even very strong-willed, highly intelligent, high judgment participants in that meeting will wonder, “Well, if Jeff thinks that, I came in this meeting thinking one thing, but maybe I’m not right.” He is aware of his own halo.

Managing the halo effect requires questioning yourself and those around you. It requires setting up systems that slow down your thinking.

Why do you believe what you believe? If someone else said this, would I be nodding my head?

Are they extrapolating from a first impression? Are they assuming competence in one area leads to expertise in another?

Identifying the halo effect in yourself and others is easier said than done, but If Ed can tell Steve to stand down, I think you can push back on the halos in your corner of the world.