9 Psychological Effects You Can Turn To Your Advantage

8. The Halo Effect

Don't worry about cultivating a pleasant and well-rounded personality, just utilise the Halo Effect instead. The Halo Effect is a type of cognitive bias, in which somebody's overall impression of something can be influenced by a single characteristic. Basically, if a person knows one positive thing about you, they'll tend to extrapolate that to the rest of your personality. You'll be unsurprised to learn that this often comes into play with physical attractiveness. If you think a person is attractive, you're also more likely to assume that they're nice, clever and definitely not racist or anything. On the flip side, if somebody is unattractive, they're statistically more likely to be perceived as stupid or unpleasant - this is known as the Horns Effect. The real take-away from all of this is that you should just focus on one narrow aspect of your personality and hope that nobody decides to look too closely.