“…Unfortunately, we did not assess participants' overall impression of the ratee and thus could not test this speculation empirically. Nonetheless, the literature describing halo in performance ratings suggests that overall evaluations can influence dimension ratings (e.g., Balzer & Sulsky, 1992;Cooper, 1981;Feldman, 1986;Murphy, Jako, & Anhalt, 1993;Nisbett & Wilson, 1977;Solomonson & Lance, 1997). Feldman made the point that if information regarding a ratee's true behavior is either not salient or absent for another reason, raters use a "default option" based on either an affective response to the ratee or an internal theory (such as a stereotype) when providing ratings.…”