ABSTRACT
Miller recounts the story of a psychologist who recorded a set of ordinary sentences and played them in the presence of noise so intense that the voice was just audible but not intelligible. He informed his listeners that these were sentences on some general topic for example, on sports and asked them to repeat what they had heard. The ‘personal construct’ theory of G. A. Kelly also emphasises the expectancy factor in perception. Perception, maintains Kelly, is an individual process which involves the building of a personal hierarchical network of constructs which enables the perceiver to interpret the world about him. However while we must beware the possible perceptual distortion caused by the halo effect, we may note that Wishner (1960) claimed that some characteristics do seem to go together fairly constantly and that the halo effect in consequence does not always lead to inaccuracies.
