How the Halo Effect Reinforces Body Image Standards

Izzy Watson

Instructor’s Introduction

TED speakers are meant to deliver their talks on a spotlit stage in front of a rapturous crowd. But with our WR 415: Public Writing course meeting entirely over Zoom, we had to make the same choice that TED conferences did in Spring 2021: assign prerecorded talks instead of live ones, asking our student speakers to passionately share their ideas with a laptop camera. It wasn’t easy.  

Izzy Watson’s talk on the halo effect impressively transcends the limits of the medium. Partly, it’s the way that she mixes the anecdotal with the empirical, placing her pandemic experience in conversation with scholarly research. But it’s also the way that her script and delivery reach through the screen, nudging us to empathize with her experience and to question ourselves and the choices we’ve made. Plus, Izzy is very funny—and that’s especially hard to be without an audience to laugh with.  

Marisa Milanese

How the Halo Effect Reinforces Body Image Standards

Isabella (Izzy) Watson is a rising senior in the Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development  majoring in Social Studies Education and Political Science. Her passions are educational and environmental policy. Born and raised in a conservative farm-town in Connecticut, she faced bullying and harassment in school due to her weight and being openly LGBT. After being sent back home from Boston in March 2020, she used the pandemic as an excuse to change who she was. After growing out her hair and losing 30 pounds, she was confronted with the harsh realities of how people’s actions change drastically based on their perceptions.