Have you ever wondered why society treats conventionally attractive people better than others who aren’t as attractive? Well, it's something called the halo effect! The halo effect is when your perspective on someone is determined by their appearance, specifically, more conventionally attractive people will be seen as innocent and sweet compared to ugly people, even if the attractive person isn't a good person. There’s also something called the horn effect, similar to the halo effect, it has to do with appearance. The horn effect is where people specifically view those who don't view the beauty standard as villains. So let's explore these effects on society.
I think the perfect example of the halo effect was on TikTok a few months ago. There was a man by the name of Cameron Herrin, 26 years old, and the killer of a mother and her child. Cameron committed a heinous crime, yet numerous people on TikTok defended him due to his conventional attractiveness. People stated things along the following lines, “Open that cell, let that boy outta jail!” “He's too fine to be a murderer” “Everybody makes mistakes!” When putting this into perspective, I think you can see how wrong this is. Like I always say, “Don't judge a book by its cover.”
The horn effect is also known as an ugly effect, the horn effect affects ugly people. When people see an unconventionally attractive person online, they will automatically think they’re ugly on the outside but not only that, they’d think they’re ugly on the inside as well. They think ugly people do ugly things which can happen, but you shouldn’t judge a group of people just because of their looks. An example of this is Dhar Mann because he makes educational videos but he's conventionally unattractive so lots of people think badly about him just because he isn't looking.
As you can see, far too many people judge others based on their physical appearance. Of course, we can’t COMPLETELY avoid the halo effect, but what we CAN do is try. If we all work to fix this bias towards attractiveness, we can be more accurate with our judgments.