The question was raised by a Spanish psychology practice, but it answers something every one of us lives through each July. A footballer was, until yesterday, just one name in the squad. After the World Cup, suddenly „there is something about him”. Nothing about him has changed. What changed is the number of times you have seen him.

The halo effect: one good trait colours the whole picture

Psychologists call it the halo effect. One visible positive trait - he is handsome, he is a hero, he is famous - contaminates the entire perception. As psychologist Aurora Lopez explains, without knowing him at all you are already attributing loyalty, kindness and emotional maturity to him. Nobody has seen any of those things. You are adding them.

This is not only about footballers. The same mechanism works when you see a well-styled candidate photograph, a well-shot campaign ad, or a man who looks confident on screen. The brain takes one data point and builds an entire character out of it.

The exposure effect: it is enough just to look at him

The second mechanism is even less exciting and even more powerful. In the 1960s the psychologist Robert Zajonc showed that the more we see something or someone, the more we like it - for no reason, with no real contact, purely from repeated exposure.

Lopez explains it with almost mechanical precision: every time you look at a face, the brain processes it. By the tenth time, that face is already comfortable, predictable and safe to the nervous system. That is not attraction, it is recognition pretending to be attraction.

Who decides what you see ten times

And here comes the part that, east of Vienna, is more than psychology. If liking grows with repetition, then whoever decides which face appears on your screen ten times a day is not offering you a choice - they are shaping you. That applies to your phone's algorithm as much as to a television station's editorial policy.

Psychologists suggest four questions to check whether the attraction is yours or was placed inside you: what do you actually know about this person, what happens when they disappear from the screen, are you drawn to what they are or to how you imagine you would feel next to them, and finally - test it in real contact.

The questions were written for crushes and relationships. They work just as well when the face on the screen is a politician rather than a footballer.