The effect of primacy and novelty - why the first opinion can be wrong

The famous Coco Chanel said: “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” Undoubtedly, this brilliant woman was right. In the first 30 seconds, the unconscious reads basic information and creates the first impression of a person. Everything else will be superimposed on this foundation of the first impression. The first information received goes into the “box” of long-term memory, and the rest goes into short-term memory.

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Therefore, some information about a person is forgotten, you cannot accurately remember the details of the conversation. But the first meeting and the first phrases can remain in memory for a very long time. This mechanism complicates matters when the first impression of a person is falsely positive.

Your friends then wonder how you tolerate his behavior and antics, how can you not see what kind of person he is?! And I remember that bright first date, when he was polite, handsome and gallant as ever. Indeed, he was never really like that. But he knows how to make an impression. Someone does this consciously, understanding the words of Coco Chanel and using this chance.

In this article:

Brain trapsExampleNovelty effectTwo oppositesHalo effect

Brain traps

In psychology, the primacy effect has been described for a long time. First, something similar was discovered by the little-known American psychologist M. Lundt in 1025. He called this the law of precedence. However, this fact is practically not mentioned in psychological literature and all the laurels of the discovery belong to the Polish-American psychologist Solomon Asch.

In 1946, he described the primacy effect in one of his articles. Solomon Asch conducted an experiment in which two groups of people were given a list of personality traits and asked to rate the person. Group A received a list starting with positive qualities, such as hard work and intelligence. Group B received a list starting with negative qualities, such as envy and stubbornness. In general, both lists contained the same qualities, just in a different order.

Thus, Asch’s experiment clearly shows how powerfully first impressions affect a person. The primacy effect is attributed to perceptual errors and cognitive distortions.

Halo effect

Areas of use

The edge effect is used in many areas of people's lives. Knowing this feature of people's memory, you can effectively influence them in various areas and achieve your goals.

Example

The most striking example is the impression of a person. For example, you come to an interview and the boss seems to you to be a stern and domineering person. In the future, your impression does not justify itself. His gaze, which seemed stern to you, was simply focused and serious. The boss seemed overbearing to you, but he turned out to be quite capable of dialogue and cooperation. This is where his strength manifests itself. However, your first fears last a long time, and you are still afraid of this person. The primacy effect lasts a long time.

The same thing happens with numbers: you’ll better remember from a number series those that come at the beginning.

Examples of phenomena in life

The phenomenon of remembering data at the beginning and end of an information line is used in practice in many areas. This feature of human memory is used especially successfully by marketers in commercials and videos.

The main principle and purpose of such an advertising block is to remember the brand and product by the buyer. Therefore, most commercials contain at the beginning and end of the video various calls to action with their product with a mandatory mention of the brand (for example, always Coca-Cola, good juice, Colgate paste).

Sometimes (especially in a video) the name of the advertised brand and product may simply stand alone at the beginning and end of the speech structure and not be associated with the main text, which only enhances the effect.

Sales-oriented online store sites are created using the same principle:

• the “Buy” or “Cart” tab is located at the end of the menu;
• buttons “Catalogue” or “Products” - at the beginning.

But people encounter the edge effect phenomenon not only under the influence of pragmatic marketers. This happens in everyday life as well.

It is common for any person to remember their first kiss, first love, first salary received, or other important event that took place for the first time. Moreover, when repeated, these events are not imprinted in the memory so deeply - few people remember the 5th or 6th salary or the 10th bike ride.

Also, in everyday life, sometimes people may encounter the fact that when listening to several songs, the last one is constantly scrolling through the brain, interrupting other thoughts. You can stop this process in the same way, simply by listening to another less annoying song or melody, which will be remembered as the last one.

The edge effect in psychology is an interesting phenomenon that characterizes the functioning of memory, when a person best remembers information located not in the middle of the information flow, but at its beginning and end.

This phenomenon has an ambiguous meaning, since on the one hand it allows you to present educational material in the most suitable form for memorization, and on the other hand, it can be used for various kinds of marketing and political manipulation.

In general, the discovery of the edge effect helped to better understand how human memory functions and what are the features of the perception of information depending on its location in the information series.

Novelty effect

The recency effect is the opposite of the primacy effect. The effect of novelty often occurs in those who are open to new impressions, sensations, and events. When something new covers everything old. The effect of novelty is unlikely to manifest itself in a conservative who loves traditions, order and stability. Such a person is less susceptible to the effect of novelty; his thinking “likes” the effect of primacy more.

To give the most striking examples, the effect of the primacy effect is a monogamous person. Met a girl and fell in love. And she remains forever for him the most beloved, desired, most extraordinary. All other girls and women pale in comparison to her. The first impression of a beloved is very strong and is kept in the heart for many years.

The novelty effect is Don Juan. Each new lady of the heart is more beautiful than the previous one. And such a man flutters from one beautiful flower to another. And at first every woman seems incredible to him, something he had never seen before that moment. She simply outshines everyone and everything. And her voice seems unusual, like a melody, and her hair is soft like silk, and her skin is extraordinary. And she herself seems to be filled with light.

Unfortunately, over time, the effect of novelty wears off. The princess is humanized and seems ordinary. Her light-illuminated image fades, and she stands on a par with all the previous ones. And Don Juan is sad about another disappointment. Until he meets the next one and only.

Switching

Switching is constantly changing trading strategies without any real reason for it. This usually happens either after a series of losing trades, or after the account equity changes to negative.

The most recent losing trades made are convincing enough to make a trader believe that his strategy is no longer viable, even though it is generally profitable.

When this happens, the trader changes strategy. When a similar drawdown occurs with a new strategy, he changes it again, and so on.

The trader believes that he is successfully avoiding a series of losing trades because he stops trading the strategy when it becomes unprofitable. In reality, systems do not have profitable periods, since each of them never completely goes through a drawdown and does not begin to make a profit; As a result, the presence of only losing series of trades affects the trading account.

If a strategy has been tested and there is evidence that it is a winner, then the right thing to do is to trade it during the drawdown period. However, poor trading results will be a recent event, and instead of following a logical plan, traders will try to avoid losing trades by switching from a winning system to another.

Two opposites

The primacy effect and the novelty effect have their advantages. You can rely on the primacy effect if it is important for you to create an impression. The main thing is to create the image and behave correctly. Especially if this is a stable person, little susceptible to mood swings and the effect of novelty.

The effect of novelty, in turn, also has advantages - it opens up a lot of new things for a person, allows him to develop and move on, get vivid impressions and broaden his horizons.

Image by inna mikitas from Pixabay

The disadvantages of the primacy effect are that a person is too dependent on this first impression. And it often turns out to be false. Then he is a hostage to his perception. And it’s harder for him to move towards something new. The downside of the novelty effect is the opposite. It is too difficult for a person to maintain a relationship with anything for a long time and stably. He has a need for novelty, for sensations and surprise.

The golden mean is to have both stability and the desire for novelty - everything in balance. In some ways, rely on the old, familiar and understandable. And in some areas, move and expand your own horizons.

Interpersonal perception

Interpersonal perception. (interpersonal perception) The impressions we form about other people serve as an important basis for interpersonal interactions. People's perceptions. - Is a complex and distinctly different object from the perception of space. In this case, the attention of the human observer is directed to the internal psychological processes of the human stimulus. These processes are practically undetectable by sensory mechanisms; information about them is obtained through inferences or attributions made by the observer. In this sense, "human perception" is not a good name, and the process might better be called "inferences about people." Most of the topic M.V. is now covered by attribution theory. Fritz Heider pointed out 3 differences in the perception of physical objects and people. First, people are believed to have an inner life, as opposed to physical objects. Every person has thoughts and experiences emotions, believing that others are no different from him in this regard. Second, physical objects are not perceived as the cause of their own actions, whereas people are often seen as the primary causes of their actions. The concept of responsibility is closely related to the idea that people are guided in their actions by their own internal considerations, and not simply subject to the inexorable demands of their environment. Third, humans can deliberately manipulate and exploit observers, but inanimate objects cannot. One of the purposes of human perception is to enable a human observer to predict the likely actions of a human stimulus in order to take them into account when planning his own actions. The study of human perception is essentially an attempt to reconstruct the way the average person on the street processes information about other people and about themselves. Such an observer is interested in answering the question of why a given human stimulus acts or behaves the way it does. According to Haider, the causes of behavior are usually attributed either to the environment or to the actor himself.

When an action can be attributed to environmental causes, the subject is not held responsible for the positive or negative consequences of his behavior, but when individual internal factors are perceived as the sources of behavior, the subject in question is fully responsible for those consequences. Much of the work on attribution research has focused on the rules that observers use when attributing the causes of behavior to the environment or to the actor himself. Heider believed that the interpersonal function of human perception is to enable the observer to predict and control the behavior of other people. The tendency of observers is to accept the first suitable cause as the basis of behavior. However, if there are other probable reasons, the influence of a particular reason on achieving the effect is devalued. This principle of devaluation can lead to the attribution of both environmental and personal reasons for observed behavior. Moreover, the more effects associated with an agent's behavior, the more plausible the reasons may be. G. Kelly, who proposed this discounting principle, supplemented it with the augmentation principle. The more a person risks spending to act as he does, the more likely it is that the observer attributes his behavior to internal, personal reasons. In general, the more an observer believes that an actor's behavior differs from the behavior of most other people in a similar situation, the more that behavior will be attributed to something unique (or is attributed) to that actor. The observer may see the actor's behavior only once, or he may have unlimited opportunities to observe it. Most attribution rules can be based on either a single observation or multiple observations.

The first case includes the following. Behavior out of role. Extra-role behavior can be interpreted as a derivative of the principle of reinforcement. A person who violates role boundaries thereby gives up habitual rewards and appears willing to accept further negative reactions from others. Thus, in doing so, he must be guided by certain personal considerations. Non-general effects (popsottop effects). An observer can mentally reconstruct another person's decision-making process to understand the reason for their choice. It can be assumed that the chosen alternative is preferred because it maximizes some value for that person, at least relative to other alternatives, i.e. The basis of a decision is some effect that is not common to the possible decision alternatives, and this effect allows us to learn something about the person making the decision. Hedonic meaning. If another person's behavior has a certain positive or negative effect on the observer, then the observer will be more inclined to attribute that behavior to personal reasons. Personalism. When an observer experiences positive or negative effects of an actor's behavior, the observer may wonder whether these effects were specifically intended for the observer. If the observer believes that the behavior in question was directed at him (personally) or against him (her), then he is more confident in making personal attributions. G. Kelly also provided his model with a set of rules that naive observers can use to guide their selection of attributes as a result of multiple observations of an actor. If the observer does not have a preconceived cause-and-effect framework upon which certain behaviors are analyzed, reasons given, and graded according to proficiency, he will apply a rational process for processing the available data, similar to that used by researchers. According to Kelly, the following principles allow an observer to attribute the causes of behavior to the actor, the environment, or both.

Subsequence. A consistent response indicates a stable environmental cause, while an inconsistent response indicates fluctuations in personal factors. Vagueness. In general, the more differentiated the response is across different objects, the more likely the observer is to attribute it to environmental factors, and the less differentiated the response, the more likely it is to be a personal attribution. Consistency (consensus). If the majority of people react to a situation in the same way, then this makes it easier to assign environmental status. But if a particular person reacts differently than most people, then personal attribution is more likely. There is a tendency to distinguish between the attributes of the agent and the observer. Actors tend to view their own actions as forced, arising under strong pressure from external circumstances. On the contrary, as Heider writes, the actor's behavior tends to fill the observer's field of perception. This actor-orientation, by relegating the role of the environment to the background, leads observers to rely more often on personal attributes than on the actor, which has been called the fundamental attribution error. Moreover, subjects naturally have more information about themselves and a broader context in which to make attributions than observers. I. Jones and C. Davis argues that once an observer makes an attribution of personal causes, a correlational inference is made from the observed behavior and an inference is made about the motive underlying the behavior. The observer will note environmental influences and observe possible correlations with behavior.

If behavior is associated with environmental factors, then information processing stops. However, in the case of personal attribution, the researcher may assume that the actor intends to produce the observed effects. Intention implies that the actor is aware of possible consequences in advance and is able to cause them. Intention does not refer to observed behavior, but to its consequences (outcomes and consequences). When an intention is attributed to an actor, the motive behind that intention is sought. Correlational inference assumes a commonality between the type of response and the motive attributed to it. According to this theory, an observer's attribution of the causes of behavior is always followed by a subsequent correlational inference. It is further assumed that recognition and labeling of responses is an unproblematic and natural mechanism, similar in many ways to the action of proximal forces of the perceptual field. It is argued that action cannot be identified separately from the goals by which the subject is supposed to be guided. It is clear that observers form complex (summative) impressions of others. Sources of information include direct observations and reports from other observers. Some types of information play a more important role in the formation of such summative impressions, while others are more peripheral or insignificant. Norman Anderson has proposed mathematical models of how observers process and weigh information about actors provided to them (in adjectival form). For example, how much more weight might be given to certain characteristics over others when judging a person's likability, or how much more weight might be given to early information compared to later information.