First Blog

The Halo Effect There is in psychology a phenomenon called the halo effect . For the teacher it essentially comes to this: if a student does well on the first few exam problems graded, the teacher will normally grade higher the remainder of the problems.  The counter to this is to grade the first question of all exams, then the second, and so on.  It takes more time. But it erases the effect.  Of course, it is important to not know student names, to try not to remember handwriting, and other clues to whose paper is being graded.  But the halo effect applies to many other phenomena. Now suppose I was going to talk about science, like to tell you things that are generally new and mostly unknown.  How would you receive it?  If you knew me and trusted my words are carefully measure, you would look more favorably toward what I say, and vise-versa. Again, the halo effect.  On the other hand, if you didn't know me, you would read the words with a more questioning outlook and decide well i