Your favorite antihero could be shaping your values more than you realize.

The people you admire literally rewire your brain.

Every story you celebrate leaves a mark on your character.

The Netflix documentary The Crash revisits the 2022 case of Mackenzie Shirilla, a young Ohio woman convicted of intentionally driving a vehicle into a building at over 100 miles per hour, killing her boyfriend and another passenger. Yet much of the public conversation surrounding the case has focused not on the tragedy itself, but on something else entirely. Just scroll through the social media comments to see the striking pattern of discussion about the alleged killer’s youth, beauty, and the unsettling contrast between appearance and action. “How can someone who appears so young, attractive, familiar, or ordinary be capable of something so devastating?” was the question on the public’s mind.

Psychologists have long documented what’s known as the halo effect: the tendency to assume that attractive individuals possess other positive qualities, including intelligence and moral goodness. When an attractive person commits a horrific act, our brains experience a kind of cognitive conflict. The story doesn’t fit our expectations, and we tend to instinctively search for explanations that preserve the image we’ve already formed so that we can reconcile what we see with what we believe.

Shouldn’t we scrutinize the evidence more carefully?

But what about the mitigating circumstances?

The facts don’t change, but our interpretation of them shifts, or at least stretches. Thus it’s not so much the “truth” as our own........

© Psychology Today