[LINK] "Genius or offensive figure? How Ghomeshi divides our minds"

[rfmcdonald]

Writer Dan Gardner has an excellent piece in The Globe and Mail talking about the "halo effect". Starting from the ongoing and worsening Jian Ghomeshi scandal, he notes that humans seem predisposed to believe that successful and accomplished people are also morally good people, when in fact no such necessary connection exists.

How talented Jian Ghomeshi is tells us precisely nothing about what he did or did not do. He may be a supremely gifted broadcaster and a loathsome man who likes to hurt unconsenting women. Or he may be an overrated prima donna and the victim of an appalling smear campaign. But there is no reason to think his talent and his behaviour are correlated.

And yet many people treat them as if they are, and they judge accordingly – whether it is those lining up against Mr. Ghomeshi, who treat references to his talent as a tacit assertion of his innocence, or the many fans of Mr. Ghomeshi who immediately and emphatically sided with him after the story broke even though there was almost no information available aside from Mr. Ghomeshi’s own account.

We’ve seen this many times before. Woody Allen. Roman Polanski. In the abstract, it’s easy to separate the art and the artist, and, if need be, to praise one and condemn the other. But confronted by a painfully real case, our judgements tend to correlate. Chances are, how you feel about Woody Allen’s movies hints at how you feel about Woody Allen.

[. . .]

Early in the 20th century, a psychologist named Edward Thorndike discovered that when employers and military officers rated others across a range of dimensions – intelligence, industry, technical skill, reliability, leadership, and so on – their judgments tended to correlate, which suggested they weren’t considering each quality separately, as they were instructed to, and as they believed they were doing. Instead, there was “a marked tendency to think of the person in general as rather good or rather inferior and colour the judgements of the qualities by this general feeling.”

Mr. Thorndike called it the “halo effect,” because a person who was seen to be exceptionally good in some way – especially attractive, intelligent or creative – seemed to wear a halo. How honest is this exceptionally attractive person? How diligent? How hard-working? How much of a leader? In every case, very. He must be. Those are good qualities and this is a good man. Just look at his halo.