The later we meet someone in a sequence, the more negatively we describe them
People tend to describe individuals they encounter later in a sequence more negatively than those they see first, according to a recent psychology study based on rating faces and reality TV contestants. Commenters connect this to real-world scenarios like job interviews, auditions, trials, and demo days, suggesting factors such as fatigue, calibration against earlier candidates, anchoring, and recency effects may skew judgments. Many remain skeptical, pointing to methodological concerns, participant fatigue in online studies, and the broader replication problems in social psychology, and call for more rigorous and repeated experiments before treating the effect as robust.
Perceived Ordering Effects in Evaluations
- Many commenters connect the result to lived experience: wanting to present early in class, pitch early or late in demo days, or schedule interviews just after lunch to avoid fatigue and comparison overload.
- Several note that middle-of-the-pack candidates or presentations tend to blur together and be less memorable than those at the start or end.
Relationship to Known Biases and Theories
- The effect is linked to anchoring and sequential anchoring: early items set a reference point against which later ones are judged more harshly.
- Some see tension with recency bias and expect an “inverted U” (early + late advantages) rather than a simple monotonic decline.
- Hiring/order strategies are compared to the “secretary problem,” though multiple commenters argue that model doesn’t fit real hiring where decisions can be delayed and multiple good outcomes exist.
Methodology, Validity, and Replication Skepticism
- Multiple commenters are wary of popular-psychology claims, likening this to other social-psych effects that failed to replicate.
- Concerns include:
- Use of Facebook photos or reality-TV contestants as stimuli, which may not generalize to real hiring or social contexts.
- Counting positive words rather than numeric ratings, and possible confounds from fatigue, shorter later descriptions, or participants just wanting to finish.
- Ease of faking such datasets and the broader replication/fraud issues in behavioral science.
- Some psychologists in the thread explicitly caution that the protocol measures immediate impressions, not final decisions.
Alternative Explanations and Nuances
- Suggested mechanisms include calibration over time (initial “rounding up,” later penalizing), familiarity with early examples, and participants feeling pressure to say something “new,” pushing them toward more negative descriptors later.
- Others argue that in real hiring/auditions, teams deliberately calibrate, take notes, and compare afterward, which may reduce or change the ordering effect.
Practical and Ethical Implications
- Commenters highlight fairness concerns in interviews, auditions, university admissions, and even legal trials, especially under fatigue and time pressure.
- Some propose mitigations: batching candidates, detailed note-taking, delayed decisions, or AI-assisted moderation of sequential biases, though their effectiveness remains unclear.