复习周末练习阅读d.doc

周末练习1 D The “halo effect” is a classic finding in social psychology. It is the idea that general evaluations (评价)　about a person (e.g. she is likeable) influence judgments about their specific traits（品质）(e.g. she is intelligent). Hollywood stars give the perfect example. Because they are often attractive and likeable, we naturally consider they are also intelligent, friendly and so on. That is, sometimes, not true. In the 1970s, well-known social psychologist Richard Nisbett set out to prove the fact that we actually pay little attention to our thought processes in general, especially to the halo effect. Nisbett wanted to examine the way students made judgments about teachers. They had been divided into two groups to watch two different videos of the same teacher, who happened to have a strong Indian accent. One group watched the teacher answer a series of questions in an extremely warm and friendly manner. The second group saw exactly the same person answer exactly the questions in a cold and distant manner. In one the teacher appeared to like teaching and students, and in the other he came across as someone powerful who didn’t like teaching at all. After each group of students watched the videos they were asked to evaluate the teacher on physical appearance, mannerisms and even his accent (mannerisms were kept the same across both videos). The same as the halo effect infers, students who saw the “warm” one evaluated him more attractive, his mannerisms more likeable and even his accent as more pleasing. This was unsurprising as it backed up the ideas on the halo effect. At the same time, for those who had seen the other video, the result was just the wrong way around. The surprise is that students had no clue why they gave one teacher higher evaluations. Most said that how much they liked the teacher had not influenced their evaluation of his individual traits at all. The halo effect is fascinating and now well-used in the business world. For example, books th