“Say hello to Halo”: the halo effect in sports

Abstract

In daily life, people tend to use mental shortcuts to simplify and speed up their decision-making processes. A halo effect exists if the impression created by a dominant attribute influences how other attributes of an object or subject are judged. It involves a cognitive bias that leads to distorted assessments. However, the halo effect has barely been researched in a sports-related context, although it can substantially contribute to understanding how sport fans think and behave. The objective of this paper is to answer the question that is of interest for both theory and practice of sports marketing: Is there a halo effect in sports? Does the sporting success or failure of a professional soccer team radiate or even outshine other sports-related and non-sports aspects and influence or distort how the club is perceived by its fans? Fans of six soccer clubs selected from the first German soccer league Bundesliga were interviewed. This paper presents the results of an empirical study based on a data set consisting of a total of 4,180 cases. The results of the analyses substantiate the distortion of the fans’ perception with regard to a very diverse range of aspects that is triggered by the sporting success or failure of their favorite club.

Bias, Halo Effect and Horn Effect: A Systematic Literature Review

“…A total of four studies out of five studies focused on Bias and Halo effect (Jones & Bergin, 2019;Matlock et al, 2017;Sonnert et al, 2018;Sutu et al, 2019), and one study focused on the Halo effect only (Sheppard, 2019) in United States of Amerika (USA). Two studies out of three focused on Bias, Halo effect and Horn effect (Marono & Bartels, 2020;Xu et al, 2020), and only one study focus on bias and Halo effects (Brown et al, 2017) in the United Kingdom (UK), three studies focused on bias and Halo effect (Behrmann, 2019;Jansen et al, 2021;Nufer, 2019) in German, five countries focused on the exact keywords which are Bias and Halo effect in Brazil (Rego et al, 2018), Turkey (Yilmaz, 2017), Italy (Cantarelli et al, 2020), Iran (Bijani, 2018 and Korea (Gweon et al, 2017). Finally, one study concentrated on the Dutch's bias, Halo effect and Horn effect (Marucci et al, 2021) (Table 3).…”

“…The halo effect follows a tendency to consistent assessment. People attempt to create a consistent and coordinated image of a person or object they perceive (Nufer, 2019). The halo effect works in two directions: On one hand, positive information produces a positive assessment of attributes, while similarly, negative information tends to result in a rather negative judgment of attributes (Graf & Unkelbach, 2016).…”

“…Especially when launching new products, a company stands to benefit from the halo effect. The image of a well-established brand is transferred to a newly introduced product bearing the same brand name, thereby motivating consumers to purchase (Nufer, 2019).…”

The effectiveness of the sports management system in Europe: High achievements, public funding and a healthy lifestyle

“…Sports management is a type of specific management (Nguyen, et al, 2021), which regulates the development vectors of physical culture and sports oriented organizations (Kollmann et al, 2022). Sports management considers physical culture and sport (Nufer, 2019;Čingienė 2020) not only as human motor activity, confirmed in the physical culture theory, but also as a set of special means (Caratas et al, 2021) and methods (Gavurova et al, 2021), aimed at the development of people's physical activity (Sylwestrzak et al, 2022). In addition, physical culture and sports are objects of social management (Winiarski et al, 2021;Seguer 2022;Vasilyeva et al, 2021), which function thanks to various physical culture and sports organizations, sports schools, and clubs, sports facilities and playgrounds, sports and health centers , sports teams in all possible sports, sports federations, International sports federations.…”

Country performance in e-sport: Social and economic development determinants

“…The main argument of the opponents is the lack of physical activity in e-sport competitions. But Olympic sports such as checkers, chess, and bridge also do not require physical exercise, besides they have a lot in common with organizational and economic issues (Yan, 2020;Andreas, 2020;Prykhodko, 2019;Vilma Čingienė, 2020;Chee & Kar ) and psychological-emotional (Nufer, 2019;Lukowicz & Strzelecki, 2020). Gradually, play techniques are spreading to different spheres of human activity -recreation, learning, management, politics, communication, education, and technology (Kacerauskas et al, 2022;Vovk & Vovk, 2017;Worimegbe et al, 2020).…”