The Charmer's Playbook: With Guests Wilfred Webster & Daniel Read
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So I'd like you to look at these three photos here. Okay. Sounds good. We've invited a few people to participate in a very informal experiment. For each photo, I'm going to ask you to rate different personality traits. One means that it's very low. Five is very high. So for example, if you see this person on the left and you think that they look moderately compassionate, you'd rate them as a three.

They each have three photographs, three different people. One very attractive, another average, and the third less attractive. And we've asked some different raters to look carefully at these three photos and to analyze all of the information they convey, thanks to people's postures and facial expressions and so on. Using that intel, we're having raters guess at some of the personality traits of the people in the photographs.

Okay. Compassionate. Um, I would say the handsome soulful friend on the left is I'm getting compassion most from him. It looks like he is really thinking some deep thoughts and feelings. So I can give him a five on compassion or groachy looking middle friend. Um, I'd probably give him a one just based on his expression in terms of kindness. Next on our scale. Uh, the gentleman on the left, my initial thought would be, he looks like a very nice guy. Uh,

So I'd put him at a four or a five. For intelligence, the guy in the middle, I'd probably give him a one or a two, to be honest. He really is kind of like a stereotypical, almost like Neanderthal face. And sitcom dad on the right, he's probably smart enough. I would probably give him a three on intelligence.

So you rated this person as very intelligent and kind, and this other person as highly irritable and not very empathetic. Why do you think you gave those ratings? It's just the way they come across, you know, when you have that kind of, you know, deep down gut feeling. It's of course hard to judge people's personality traits from the limited information in photographs. So how did our participants arrive at their judgments?

I don't know. Not sure. Is there an explanation for why, in this experiment, our readers tended to judge more attractive people more positively on a host of personality traits? In this episode of Choiceology, we explore a mental shortcut that affects the way we judge the qualities and traits of people, products, and companies. For better and for worse.

I'm Dr. Katie Milkman, and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you true and surprising stories about high-stakes choices, and then we examine how these stories connect to the latest research in behavioral science. We do it all to help you make better judgments and avoid costly mistakes. ♪

So the whole strategy was get to know people, get really close to people. The people I was closest with just keep murdering them off. It sounds so bad, doesn't it? But that was the strategy. This is Wilfred Webster. Hello, my name's Will slash Wilfred slash Wilf, but today we can go for Will. You might know Will from his appearance on a popular reality TV show called The Traitors.

So the basic premise of the show is 22 people, members of the public, live in a castle and three people are chosen as traitors and the traitors every night will murder someone. Don't worry, there's no violence. Murdered just means eliminated from the game by the traitors. When you murder, you just write their name on a piece of paper and that's it, it's done.

The non-traitors that are called faithfuls, they have to try and figure out who it is and they get a chance to try and banish them around the round table each night before any murders happen. Ultimately, there's a prize pot, which you have to do missions throughout the day to build up the prize pot. For our show, it was over £100,000. That's about $126,000 in prize money. The game ends when only a small group of contestants remain, after making it through many rounds of elimination.

But the money gets split between contestants in different ways, depending on who's left standing by the end of the show. So I think the main goal is to try and get there. But I think for the faithful, the actual main goal is survival. And I think as a traitor, it's survival too, but in a different way. It's just not being identified. Will was a contestant on the first season of the UK version, which was filmed in the Scottish Highlands.

I remember flying over the highlands and just thinking, this is one of the most beautiful sceneries I've ever seen. The lakes, the locks, it's honestly phenomenal. And then all of a sudden we're driving down this long drive on this beautiful estate and it looks like something from Downton Abbey or some aristocratic British film. Yeah, we get to the castle and it's stunning. All 22 contestants started the game unsure of what role they would be assigned.

Then, the host and BBC presenter Claudia Winkleman ushered everyone inside the castle to assign the roles. Either you'd be a faithful or a traitor. Everybody has a fair chance to be chosen as a traitor. The selection process began in a dark, cold room of the castle. The contestants were blindfolded, and Claudia selected three traitors to start the game by tapping them on the shoulder.

We sit there on the chairs and Claudia walks around and you hear her heels and she's walking around and around. And for me, I just wanted to be tapped so bad. I really wanted to be a traitor. Will felt a tap on his shoulder and knew he'd been selected as a traitor. It meant that during the day, he'd pretend to be a faithful and contribute to the missions to build up the prize fund. Think elaborate races by boat across Scottish locks and escape rooms in creaky cabins.

But by night, Will and his fellow traitors would conspire. For the first time in day one, we got to meet up as traitors. And you're all shocked because you've been trying to figure out who the other two traitors are all day. And then you get to commit your first murder. That person gets murdered that night. And then in the morning, that person doesn't come down to breakfast anymore.

Every morning, the faithfuls learned who had been murdered. Often, emotions ran high, but there was never much time before the cycle began again. Every day after breakfast, there would be some socializing, and then another mission would kick off to build up the prize fund. And then...

Then you have the dreaded round table, and then that's where the faithfuls get their chance to fight back at the traitors and identify and banish. During the round tables, contestants would try to identify and banish traitors.

They'd cast their votes on blackboards, and the contestants with the most votes would be kicked out of the game. On the way out, the banished contestant would reveal if they were a faithful or a traitor. And then the traitors get to meet up again and murder again, and then breakfast again, and then it repeats every day. So it's quite intense.

To play the role of traitor effectively, Will used a strategy he called befriend and betray. Befriend people, get really close to them, and then murder them. And the reason being is because the next day, if I felt guilty, I'd be able to cry. It would be naturally crying because of guilt, and people would think it's because they're my friend. So the whole strategy was, like I said, get to know people, get really close to people, the people I was closest with.

Just keep murdering them off. It sounds so bad, doesn't it? But that was the strategy. It was very simple, but very effective. Will and his fellow traitors, Amanda and Alyssa, worked undetected for several days, murdering four faithfuls together. Along with Will's befriend and betray strategy, there was another key element helping him advance through the game. And it had to do with how he appeared to his fellow contestants.

Just being a nice guy, having fun, sort of worked in my favor just because people couldn't believe it was me. People were like, it can't be him, he can't be a traitor. It's just too fun-loving and likable and carefree. Of course, it could have been Will. Every contestant had a fair chance of being a traitor.

Still, he flew under the radar. I didn't want to lie about anything to do with my life. I wanted to be really open about my life, open about who I am as a person. And yeah, I just had fun with everyone, had a laugh. And I think that helped so much. Appearances weren't just helping Will in the competition.

His fellow traders, Amanda and Alyssa, also benefited from the faithful's assumptions about them. For Amanda, it was definitely a motherly figure. She was an older woman who was really friendly and Welsh, and I think the Welsh accent really helps. I think people love a Welsh accent, so that made everybody feel warm and nice.

Alyssa was this sweet, lovely Irish girl, lovely Irish accent. And everyone was just drawn to her because she was almost the baby of the group, if I could say that. She was like the youngest there, I think. And everyone wanted to look after her. And when she got really upset because she felt guilty, people didn't believe it was guilt. They'd think it's because she's just new to it all. And she played on it, which was really, really fun to watch.

At this point in the show, thanks to some truly excellent casting decisions, the Faithfuls were grasping at straws for any clues about who the traitors could be. I think everybody found it hard because everyone was just voting for whoever for stupid reasons. Somebody might look a bit different or act a bit different from you. So people would just think, okay, that could be a traitor. For instance, Imran, one of the most intelligent people I've ever met in my life. He didn't have the best social skills. So

By the middle of the game, the faithfuls hadn't identified a single traitor. They had only interrogated innocent faithfuls during the roundtables and voted to banish them from the castle.

But then, for the first time, the faithfuls pointed fingers at Alyssa and Will. That night at the roundtable, Will had a major decision to make. Betray Alyssa or risk getting banished himself?

When I went into that room, I knew there was about four or five people that were going to vote for me. But I knew there was about three people that were voting for Alyssa. So in my mind, I was like, this is it, game on now. I have to try and convince another three or four people to go for Alyssa. She was the only one I could pick out and go for. So I remember after doing that and then sitting at the round table when the faithfuls were reading out the names they were voting for was the

Luckily for Will, Amanda voted to banish Alyssa and keep Will in the game.

When that came in, the relief, and I started crying. I just started sobbing. Like, I was like, I can't believe it. It was, oh, that was the most intense time in that castle, was waiting, thinking, oh my God, I've lost. I really didn't want to leave. I didn't want to lose. Will felt guilty for turning on his fellow traitor, Alyssa. But then a strange thing happened.

Something that worked in Will's favor. It was interesting to see how people, after I got rid of Alyssa and I was really emotional about it, they just couldn't believe it. It was really strange. They all just turned their back on me possibly ever being a traitor. They're like, nope, it can't be him. Gradually, Amanda and Will got closer to the final. And Will continued to pick off the faithfuls he was closest with.

Will and Amanda were nearing the end of the game when Amanda made a tactical error that the Faithfuls picked up on. And at the roundtable, they voted to banish Amanda. People were shocked to learn that the friendly, maternal Welsh real estate agent was, in fact, a traitor. Will, meanwhile, was still in the clear, and host Claudia gave him the option to secretly recruit another traitor onto his team, unbeknownst to the Faithfuls.

I recruited Kieran towards the end because I knew the Faithfuls, they were looking for another man. But also I thought he was strong enough to be able to play the traitor role. And he came in, he wasn't a very good traitor. Everybody knew he was a traitor. So it's about getting him out. It was the final evening of the competition. Only five contestants were left. Three Faithfuls and the two traitors, Will and Kieran.

The faithfuls weren't aware of how many traders roamed among them. The prize money of over £100,000 was still within reach for Will. The final roundtable started, and for a few minutes, everyone debated who the trader could be, with a lot of fingers pointed at Kieran. It was time to cast the votes. Kieran was up first to reveal his choice, and he delivered the biggest surprise of the competition yet. And Kieran said, "'Parting gift' and wrote my name on the board."

Will's head was spinning, as were the faithfuls. One by one, everyone else revealed their vote. Kieran. Kieran. Kieran. Kieran. And then when Kieran stood up at the end and said he was a traitor, it basically told the faithfuls that Will was also a traitor. I had no idea it was coming. And then when it did, I just panicked. And I'm like, oh, I swear I'm not a traitor. I had no time to sort of balance my brain of how to defend myself.

The Faithfuls were stunned. But still, not all of them were convinced Will was a traitor. And the game wasn't over just yet. And then all of a sudden, we have to leave the roundtable. You probably get about 10 minutes together before you have to make the final votes. The remaining four players gathered outside the castle around a fire pit. Claudia gave them the opportunity to either end the game or to banish one last time.

And I knew it was coming, I knew it was happened. So when they voted and they voted for me to be banished and I revealed myself as a traitor, it was the biggest relief I've ever felt in my life.

Finally, after nearly a dozen opportunities to eliminate Will, the Faithfuls had caught on, just in the nick of time. The nice, affable guy was, after all, a traitor. ♪

I made such good friends. In my mind, I told myself that I'd be making holiday friends, you know, friends that you'd speak to after holiday for a bit and then you sort of lose touch. And then towards the end, you start thinking, actually, these are proper friends now. We're going to be bonded for life through this experience. Wilfred Will Webster is the runner-up to The Traitors, season one on the BBC.

Before The Traders, he managed face-to-face fundraising for one of the largest charities in the UK. Today, he's a content creator and fundraising consultant. You can find more information on Will and The Traders series in the show notes and at schwab.com slash podcast. Will's experience on The Traders shows us that, yes, strategy is important, but so are appearances and first impressions.

People have a tendency to rely too much on impressions formed from a single trait or characteristic that's noticeable or easy to judge. And we allow it to influence our judgments of other, often unrelated, traits. And as we heard, sometimes those judgments are dead wrong. Think about this in a different context. There are many examples of charismatic business leaders who charm investors but end up running their businesses into the ground.

Maybe they created a positive first impression with a firm handshake and compelling personality. And that positive impression led people to believe that they also had great business acumen. Or you can probably think of politicians who succeeded based on their good looks and skillful oratory, leading voters to decide without proof that they must also be capable legislators.

It's an easy mistake to make. And when we let one easily observable feature of a person, like their appearance or their height or their charisma, bleed into our evaluation of their other unrelated features, like their trustworthiness, leadership skills, or business acumen, the error we're making is driven by something called the halo effect. My next guest is an expert on decision biases and has done some really interesting recent research on the halo effect.

Daniel Reed is a professor of behavioral sciences at Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. Hi, Daniel. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. Hi, Katie. I must say I've heard your podcast a lot and now it's so exciting to be on it.

Oh, well, it's so exciting to have you on it. I'm such a fan of your work. And I'm really excited to get to talk to you about a bias that I think we both find really fascinating, which is the halo effect. I was hoping we could just start with you describing the halo effect. What is it exactly? Well, in its most fundamental way, the halo effect is just that when we make judgments about any kind of person or object,

and their judgments of quality, like whether they're good or bad, those judgments tend to be more highly correlated than is warranted. So if we judge someone's appearance and then judge someone's personality, if the appearance is really positive, we'll judge the personality as very positive. If the appearance is not so positive, we'll judge the personality as less positive, and so forth.

It's such an interesting pattern, and I think it comes up a lot with the way we judge people. But I was wondering if you could describe some settings where you think it's particularly important to be on the lookout for it. Well, you mentioned judging people, and that's one of the areas where it's been studied the most, and especially in the area of physical attractiveness.

So it turns out that if people are perceived as physically attractive, then their personality is judged as being nicer. They tend to be seen as likely to be more successful and so on. But it's been looked at in a lot of other contexts as well. So, for example, when people mark student essays, if they mark, say, two in a row,

and they see the first essay is good, they're likely to be quite charitable towards the second essay. So even if the second essay is not a great essay, the second one, but it's ambiguous, right? It's not clearly not good. They'll be quite generous toward it. And similarly, if the first essay is not good, they won't be generous even towards the second essay. So you end up with this kind of stream of similar judgments for essays.

Interesting. And I love that essay example. So if I graded all my students' assignments at the end of the semester and say Sarah submits a great homework one and then I turn to her homework two, the halo effect means I'll give her the benefit of the doubt? That's right.

Do you have, out of curiosity, a favorite classic study of the halo effect? Maybe it's about essays, but maybe it's about something else? There is actually a classic study on essays that's pretty interesting. And this relates to attractiveness and essays. So they had male raters look at essays, and the essays were either good or poor. They'd been rated in advance as being good or poor. And then they asked these male raters questions.

to evaluate the essays and they also had a picture of the person who had written it who was either attractive or unattractive. And what they found is that

The poor essays were rated much more highly if the writer was attractive. And also, the ability of the writer was judged as being much greater if they were attractive than unattractive based on the essay. And these were very large effects. I can actually give you another study that I find kind of cute, in which a person came to a classroom and they gave a little discussion. And then they left the room and the teacher asked them to say, well, how tall was the person?

Now, this person was either described as being a postdoc or an assistant professor or a full professor. And what they found is that the height of this person, the estimated height, went up with the person's stature or status, literally stature in this case, where the full professor was judged as taller than the postdoc and the postdoc less tall than the assistant professor and so on. That's really, really fascinating work.

Can you explain what we know about why the halo effect arises where this comes from?

Well, I think that the main cause is that most of the time when we are making judgments about two things, they tend to be a bit correlated. And we know that they're related in some way. And this is a conscious effect, by the way, I'm describing here. We know that, say, attractiveness might indeed be correlated with personality on average a little bit because the person may have different experiences and so forth.

But how big is that correlation? Well, it's probably pretty small in reality. Most correlations in the world are pretty small. But how do you, in your judgments, express a small correlation? It's quite hard to do.

It's really interesting. And of course, you're highlighting that it aligns with this general tendency of heuristics to be based on something that maybe is true to some degree on average, but leads us to make mistakes in many situations. Would you call this a heuristic? I would call it, yeah, a heuristic or a bias. You could use either term if you like. I don't think that it's necessarily that the halo effect is always wrong.

but the halo effect itself is an extreme response when we should be giving perhaps a moderate response in most cases. The very first study of halo effect was

was 1920, Edward Thorndike. He wrote a paper which defined the halo effect. One of the things he did is he looked at many, many different ratings of soldiers on a number of dimensions. So what Thorndike observed was that the correlations between all of the ratings were much, much higher than they should have been. And even correlations between things that probably shouldn't have been correlated at all were actually quite high. So for example, intelligence and strength were

These were soldiers, right? Intelligence and strength, which probably are not correlated particularly strongly. In fact, perhaps not at all. We're correlated at 0.7 in these ratings. Which is really high, right? Because the correlation goes from zero to one and 0.7 is about as high as you ever see in the natural world. Exactly, yes. And he said that the correlations were three or more times as high as they should have been.

That's really interesting. Daniel, one of the reasons I was so excited to have you on this podcast, in addition to your extensive knowledge of judgment and decision-making, is that you've done some really interesting recent research on the halo effect in the domain of corporate social responsibility, or CSR. Could you talk a little bit about that work? Yes. So this was work that was done with Sofia Lopez Rodriguez and Craig Smith, who

We did a series of studies, and actually it's still ongoing. But what we did is we described companies to our respondents, either a company which had undertaken some kind of positive CSR initiative in some domain, and

or had not. The company wasn't bad, but we didn't mention that they had done some kind of CSR activity. So an example would be a company which had a kind of ambitious recycling program for printer cartridges. And then we asked whether this company had done other things, right? And we asked them both about specific actions or else we asked them about more general things like, does it do things that are good for the environment? Does it do things that are good for its customers and so forth?

And first we found that there was quite a strong relationship between people's judgments about unknown activities that the company did if in the same domain. So, for example, the company that was recycling printer cartridges would be evaluated very positively for all types of other environmental activities. But in addition, there was a generalization to other domains of activity. So they would also treat their customers better.

They would also do more for the community and so forth. So we got a halo effect within the domain

But in addition, it was cross-domain. So a company that did one really good thing for the environment would be judged as very positive and also very likely to have carried out a large number of other very good things in a very large number of domains. So it shows that one action for a company can have quite an impact on how people judge it.

It's really interesting. It makes me think back to taking accounting in college and learning about the idea of goodwill as something that you could put on a balance statement. And it seems like this is sort of a way of almost quantifying what that means and what that goodwill is, is these spillover effects from when you make somebody happy. That's right. Yeah. So they're making inferences. And this is where it would be a true halo effect in the sense that those inferences are

are perhaps not fully warranted. You know, like the company is probably not doing all these things. There's no real reason to assume that they have yet. Nonetheless, we make these kind of positive judgments. I have to say, as a woman, it makes me think a lot about makeup and all the attention that's paid to physical attractiveness in our culture. And it makes me sad because it seems to suggest that those kinds of investments are wise as opposed to unnecessary. Yes.

I'm afraid that does seem to be what it suggests. As you point out, not just a nasty way of thinking about this, but also a positive spin, which is to recognize that when you do things that are genuinely good, you really put in effort and score well on a test or give a great presentation or put together a fabulous podcast, that not only will you incur benefits in terms of

how you're assessed on that activity, but you'll actually get spillover benefits. So all good actions may do us even more good than we appreciate objectively. So maybe that's a nicer way to think about it. Now that's absolutely right. So we can think that whatever we do, we're creating an impression in people and that impression is going to be generalized.

So you want to make a good impression, and that's exactly what you said. Do you have any advice to our listeners on how they can improve their everyday decisions now that they better understand the halo effect? Well, you can approach decisions differently. So if you have to make multiple assessments, let's say you need to evaluate an employee, and you have to evaluate the employee on several different dimensions.

Either not make all the evaluations at once, try to find objective criteria by which to make the evaluations, or you can even have different people make evaluations of different dimensions. If you're a teacher and you're evaluating several essays by the same student, but you also have many students, first evaluate essay one for all the students, and then essay two for all the students, and then essay three for all the students.

And you'll end up with a much better picture of that student that's not subject to this bias. Other things for teachers, you should not know who your students are when you're evaluating their essays. In England, we know nothing about the students when we evaluate their essays, right? We don't know who they are. It's an anonymized thing.

And in almost every case, I have no idea who they are. But in the United States, when I've taught there, we often do know who the students are. And I feel like that possibly is a source of bias where we think, well, that's the student's good. This must be a really good essay that that kind of thing can happen. So I think somehow making judgments independent of one another is the way of eliminating the halo effect in your life.

I love that advice. I think it's excellent advice. As much blind rating as possible, as many independent judgments as possible, as much objectivity as possible, because otherwise this will creep in. Yeah. Daniel, this has been such a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today about the halo effect. Thank you. Well, thank you, Katie. It's been really a lot of fun. Thank you.

Daniel Reed is a professor of behavioral science at Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. He's also the author of dozens of terrific papers about judgment and decision-making, including an excellent recent paper on the halo effect and corporate social responsibility called CSR Halo, The Gift That Keeps On Giving. You can find a link in the show notes and at schwab.com slash podcast.

In the world of investing, one area where the halo effect can impact decisions is in the evaluation of ESG strategies, which means choosing investments based on environmental, social, and governance factors, or ESG for short. Just because a fund manager has good intentions or says all the right things, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll be able to execute a successful investing strategy in the real world.

To learn more about ESG investing, check out the Financial Decoder podcast episode titled, How Can You Invest Your Values? You can find it at schwab.com slash financial decoder or wherever you get your podcasts. As you've probably guessed, the halo effect is so named after halos depicted in religious iconography.

A halo is a circle of light that extends outside the body of a holy or sacred figure to depict the extremity of their goodness. It's as if those figures' goodness is literally spilling out of them. And the halo effect describes our tendency to too readily assume if a person, product, or company has one good trait, that goodness spills over to affect other traits.

The most important implication of the halo effect is that to make the most accurate judgments, you should ideally judge people, companies, and products on one trait at a time, without knowledge of their other traits. So, for instance, rating a person's credentials without seeing what they look like, or forming a general impression of their personality by chatting with them, should give a more accurate rating of those credentials.

Likewise, judging the quality of a product based on its performance and objective tests, rather than after being wowed by its sleek appearance, will likely lead you to make a better overall decision about whether it's worth buying.

But the halo effect isn't just relevant when you're trying to improve your own judgments. It also highlights the importance of making a good first impression. Acting towards others with kindness and generosity, not just because those things are always ideal, and don't get me wrong, they are, but also, cynically, because they can have spillover effects to the way you're judged more generally. You've been listening to Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab.

If you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, a rating on Spotify, or feedback wherever you listen. You can also follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app. And if you want more of the kinds of insights we bring you on Choiceology about how to improve your decisions, you can order my book, How to Change, or sign up for my monthly newsletter, Milkman Delivers, on Substack.

Next time, we'll bring you a special episode about some of the best ways to improve your decisions. And I'll speak with Carrie Morwich about a video game that's been proven to reduce behavioral biases. I'm Dr. Katie Milkman. Talk to you soon. For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com slash podcast.