The 2025 intelligence-analysis and RAG findings that evaluators cannot separate source reliability from information credibility are instances of Thorndike's 1920 halo effect, which neither cites

cross-domain-bridgecross-time-bridgecognitive-biassource-evaluationintelligence-tradecraftRAGepistemicshistory-of-science

The vault records a two-axis source-evaluation model recurring across fields separated by eighty years — Cold-War intelligence doctrine and 2025 retrieval research converging on reliability-apart-from-credibility, and on the same failure. That failure — evaluators unable to hold the two axes independent, with the source's global standing bleeding into judgment of the specific report — is not new to 2025. It is [[claim-thorndike-1920-halo-effect-ratings-too-high-and-too-even|the bleed Edward Thorndike documented in 1920 and named the halo]] (the compound "halo effect" is the later settled form): a general impression contaminating ratings of supposedly separate attributes.

The bridge spans 105 years. Thorndike caught WWI officers letting one global impression move four "independent" trait scores together; Kelly et al. (2025) catch intelligence analysts weighting a source's standing over the information's own credibility when they judge how trustworthy that information is — and review the encoding-side evidence, Baker et al. (1968) and Miron et al. (1978), that graders use source reliability as a cue for credibility instead of scoring the two apart; reliability-aware RAG and Icard's 2024 dynamic logic build machinery around the same leak. Yet neither the halo effect nor Thorndike is cited anywhere in Kelly et al.'s paper (confirmed by a full read of the archived text at capture); the paper traces the failure only through intelligence-tradecraft literature — Samet (1975), Baker et al. (1968) — apparently unaware it is rediscovering a century-old psychometric result. The RAG literature shows no visible common ancestor either.

This makes the recurrence sharper than the existing convergence note frames it: the two 2025 fields converged not only on the model (two axes) and the failure (they collapse into one), but did so downstream of a field that had already named the mechanism — and reached for it independently. See entity-halo-effect.