Halo

We have all learnt or at least heard about biases at some point in our lives. Many believe that a lot of what happens with us in social situations is directly or indirectly affected due to our own, or others’ biases. There is one specific bias which I want to discuss in detail today.

Let’s take a look at this prevalent, widespread facet of life.

What after all, is a halo? It’s only one more thing to keep clean.

Christopher Fry

Humans are at the top of the food chain for a reason. We are probably the most evolved species that exist as part of this earth, and hopefully will be at least for the next hundred or so years.

(Provided Terminator doesn’t translate to real life, in which case a replica of the former governor of California might just rule the world.)

There is one intriguing facet of humans though. Being the most evolved specie existing on God’s green earth, we should be more than sufficient to ensure continued existence for ourselves. However, as it turns out, that’s not really the case. Human beings are social creatures.

We survive and thrive on contact and interaction with other human beings. So much so, that I think in today’s day & age, it’s almost impossible to sustain oneself without the involvement of others from the human society. It might be direct or indirect, but the involvement is inevitable.

Now, since humans are social beings, we are also more perceptive than other species. I’d like to think that the degree of impressionability diminishes as we grow older, but we are very likely to pick up on behaviours, opinions, virtues and vices of the innumerable members of human society with whom we deal everyday.

All in all, I’m trying to highlight that our environment shapes a part of how we make decisions in our daily lives. Our environment also gives rise to a certain house of thought patterns, we fondly (not really) refer to as biases. I believe most of us would agree, this word almost never have a positive connotation.

While an argument can be made that they also have some deep rooted, evolutionary reasons for their presence, biases are generally considered to be erroneous thought patterns, which have been formed due to misinformation or a general categorisation of people or events.

There are a number of biases we hear about in today’s day & age; self-serving bias, gender/racial bias, recency bias etc. There is one bias though, which I feel is one of the most underrated biases, and yet has more evidence than ever that not only does it exist, but we should be extremely cautious of falling prey to it.

In my previous article, named “Information”, we discussed how today there is more information available than ever, and how it impacts decision making. One of the reasons that there is more information than ever is that we are living in a digital age, an age of technology, which has made sharing of about our lives easier than ever.

Everyone, including myself, use a multitude of platforms today share our opinions and also show people the real life proof of how our opinions (or any results experienced thereof) have helped us live a certain lifestyle (This is as subtle as I can be about the group of “gurus” I’m hinting towards).

This brings us to the topic I wanted to highlight today, which is about a specific bias, which we all are guilty of falling prey to, which is the “Halo” effect. The Halo effect, I feel, is the most prevalent bias we experience in today’s day & age. Interestingly, lots of people are making a living (& much more) out of the errors in our ways of thinking.

In this age of personal branding, it is pretty simple to paint a halo around ourselves. And people are leveraging this simplicity to make people pay to hear their opinions on aspects on which they might not really be authorities.

We see startup owners, who are in tremendous losses, barely ensuring their own survivals, let alone their companies, come up and talk about how you can generate more leads & be profitable. We see actors, who have been less than faithful in their marriages, give interviews about how to lead a successful marriage.

We see people, whose only accomplishment is growing their following on a social media platform talk about how to be successful in life (which is a debate I constantly engage in with myself, as to whether they are right or wrong to do this, but for the intent of this article, let’s consider it to be the latter).

Bottomline is,

A person’s success in any endeavour does not necessarily translate to them being an authority on every subject out there.
Make your own decisions.

I recently heard Dan Koe, who made an amazing statement.

Do not outsource your critical thinking.

I would love it if people were to just look up from their devices for two seconds, question the credentials of the people they are listening so intently to, and make their own decisions, based on logic, data and reasoning, rather than a white light glowing from behind someone, which might just be a 1200 rupee ring light from Amazon.

Now, the opinions I am sharing here can just as easily be misconstrued to be the same thing that I am talking against. Why should you believe me?

Well, for starters, I am not charging you money to read my opinions (Yet. 😂)

If you stuck around this far, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, share this with one friend of yours whom you think will benefit from reading this. Thanks for reading, and I will see you in the next one. 🙂