We wrote an article recently on the halo effect and touched briefly on its ugly sibling, the horn effect. But, we didn’t’ dive too deep into the topic so we wanted to circle back here today and chat about it a little. The human brain is such an amazing organ. It categorizes through the lenses of our experiences, creating cognitive bias. The horn effect occurs when we have a negative first impression of something and let it affect how we see every everything about that thing. We tend to see this bias come up a lot in the hiring process, unfortunately. We’ve all heard how important it is to make a good first impression. This is one reason why. When the horn effect takes hold of our judgement, we tend to underplay good traits and a negative impression is much stronger than a positive one. Understanding the halo and horn effects can help prevent strong cognitive biases in the workplace. If we begin to understand how they work we can see them and begin to break them down.
