Teachers know about this phenomenon by this term. I don’t know what its “real” name is, if it has one. It’s the tendency to grade a student’s paper based on the unconscious expectations a teacher has of that student: Bonnie Sue always writes well. This essay is good too. Bonnie gets an A. I caught myself doing it enough times to cover students’ names when I graded their essays or to use student numbers instead of names. The expectation goes in the opposite direction, too: This student always has poor organization and bad grammar; this essay will get a D too.

But the phenomenon isn’t confined to the classroom. I see reviews that are products of the same expectations. But now the error (for that is what it is) is compounded by other criteria than expectation. We have loyalty at the top of the list, followed by the impulse to return a favor, or still other things to consider, like loyalty that goes beyond the personal—the writer may be a member of our “group” in some way, perhaps our political party, our “side”. This expression of the error is in the positive direction, but there is also a negative: This writer always criticizes me or my “side”. It’s payback time. If the error verbalized itself this way in the consciousness of the reviewer, it would be avoided by most, but it doesn’t—it’s unconscious. It’s the halo effect.

Of course, there are always those who don’t care about such old-fashioned virtues as being fair, being honest, and who gleefully go around destroying perceived “enemies”, cultivating desirable “friends”, always with a view toward their own personal advancement. It’s easy to condemn them, if it’s not always easy to spot them. Third-person is always easy, isn’t it. But when we feel a keen sense of loyalty to a person, a group or an issue, good people can fall prey to poor judgment. It’s proof again—we need it daily—that the one person whose behavior needs constant monitoring, constant questioning, is not presented in third-person. It’s that person in the mirror.

I thought of this again while reading a minor news article this morning that Anne Rice has denounced Christianity, left the “infamous group”, as she called it. Both the announcement and the blog comments on it, favorable and unfavorable, are formulaic halo/horns. And I remembered reading the reviews of her novel “Out of Egypt”, written just after her celebrated return to the Church several years ago—glowing, to say the least—so I got a copy. I couldn’t get past the second chapter. It was awful. I tried another of Rice’s novels, wanting to like it (“Angel Time”). A little better than the other one, but still, stock characterization, predictable plotting, immature thematic content, frankly boring. Is it “safe” to say this out loud now she has denounced Christianity (“my” side)? That’s not a question an honest person should ask.

In public discourse of any kind, we always group-talk. It’s necessary. But it’s just as important to remember that the public words we speak—and don’t speak—while they always have many criteria attached to them, must first serve Truth, not ourselves, our “side”, nor any other thing. If that first criterion is displaced by any other, conscious or not, the words will deceive not just their readers, but also their writers.