My Recency, Our Primacy: How Social Connection Influences Evaluations of Sequences

Abstract

Individuals have many life experiences (e.g., work and vacations) that consist of a series of interconnected episodes (i.e., temporal sequences). Assessments of such experiences are integral to daily life in that they facilitate future planning and behaviors for individuals. Therefore, these experiences often culminate in evaluations of their global affect. Past work has shown that retrospective, affective evaluations of these sequences generally exhibit an "end effect," whereby a sequence's end intensity-but not its start intensity-is disproportionately weighted. Yet, researchers have largely investigated experiences that occur alone. In contrast, many real-world experiences vary in their extent of social connection to others (e.g., working in an office with others versus alone in a cubicle). The present work fills this gap by showing the moderating role of social connection on how episodes are weighted in global affective ratings. Five studies involving two autobiographical experiences spanning several days each (workweek and spring break) and two brief simulated experiences show that high social connection leads to greater (lesser) weighting of the first (last) episode. To our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate that these effects persist across different forms of social connection (i.e., interpersonal interaction versus semantic priming tasks) and are supported regardless of whether social connection occurs at encoding or retrieval of an experience.

How leader gender influences external audience response to organizational failures.

“…We utilized purchase intent as our dependent variable of interest because this measure is reflective of consumer support of the organization and predictive of actual purchase behavior (Bhargave & Montgomery, 2015; Facebook Business, 2015; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975; Park, MacInnis, Priester, Eisingerich, & Iacobucci, 2010; Rajagopal & Montgomery, 2011). Consistent with past work (Park et al, 2010; Rajagopal & Montgomery, 2011), we measured purchase intent by asking participants to indicate their likelihood of purchasing XYZ automobiles the next time they were in the market for a car (1 = not at all likely , 7 = very likely ).…”

Cultural Mindsets Matter: Reexamining the End Effect in Tourism Experiences

“…Research has found that information processing styles impact information encoding and retrieval (R. P. Bhargave & Montgomery, 2015). The assimilation effect happens when contextual information unconsciously serves as a comparative standard in evaluative judgments (Bless & Schwarz, 2010;Schwarz & Bless, 2007).…”

“…Consistent with our reasoning, one study revealed that the end experience is a good predictor of overall evaluation when experiences are viewed in isolation, while rejecting this effect when experiences are viewed as a whole (Strijbosch et al, 2021). R. Bhargave and Montgomery (2013) also found that, when evaluating a series of temporal sequences, individuals are more likely to integrate other episodes (e.g., the first episode) into the evaluation in a joint context (vs. a solo context), and this facilitates holistic processing (R. P. Bhargave & Montgomery, 2015;Ramanathan & McGill, 2007).…”

“…Thus, the first stimulus may be better encoded. Therefore, whether the end effect exists depends on the relative retrieval advantage of the final and the first stimuli (R. P. Bhargave & Montgomery, 2015).…”

The Influence of Commodity Presentation Mode on Online Shopping Decision Preference Induced by the Serial Position Effect

“…It was a concept that was first raised against the psychology domain by using the free recall paradigm, but it was confirmed in domains of sociology, driving attribution, user experience, group decision-making, anti-air warfare (AAW), etc. [10][11][12][13][14].…”