Word.ws English Dictionary

cheerleader effect

cheerleader effect noun: a form of cognitive bias that causes individuals to appear more attractive to an observer when they are in a group.

Noun

cheerleader effect

  1. A form of cognitive bias that causes individuals to appear more attractive to an observer when they are in a group.

Origin of cheerleader effect

First used by the fictional character Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) in "Not a Father's Day", an episode of the TV series How I Met Your Mother, first broadcast in November 2008.

Questions about cheerleader effect

What does cheerleader effect mean?
Cheerleader effect means a form of cognitive bias that causes individuals to appear more attractive to an observer when they are in a group.
What part of speech is cheerleader effect?
Cheerleader effect is a noun.

Words near cheerleader effect in the dictionary

  1. cheerish
  2. cheerishness
  3. cheerlead
  4. cheerleaded
  5. cheerleader
  6. cheerleader effect
  7. cheerleaderish
  8. cheerleaderlike
  9. cheerleaders
  10. cheerleadership
  11. cheerleading

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cheerleader effect (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “cheerleader effect.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cheerleader_effect. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.