Primacy effects in personality impression formation.

Retrospective bias in test performance: Providing easy items at the beginning of a test makes students believe they did better on it

“…Participants rated their performance as best when questions were ordered from the easiest to the hardest relative to when questions were randomized. This pattern of data suggests that performance evaluations made at the end of a test are susceptible to memory-based distortions, and conceptually replicates the primacy effects found in impression formation (Anderson & Barrios, 1961): The run of easy questions at the start of the block created a more positive impression of the experience and led to higher estimates of performance without an analogous improvement in actual performance.…”

“…However, in Experiment 3 we demonstrated that this effect did not seem to be driven by an increase in item-by-item confidence or a decreased ability to distinguish between correct and incorrect responses. In other words, the effect appears to be a result of a retrospective memory bias, more specifically, a primacy bias, as demonstrated in impression formation research (Anderson & Barrios, 1961) and unlike the recency effect demonstrated with respect to hedonic experiences (Kahneman et al, 1997). This outcome makes sense, given that our procedure is closer in nature to the procedure of impression formation than to that of ongoing experience, because it involves discrete verbal events as opposed to a fluid experience.…”

“…Questions were either arranged from the easiest to the most difficult, or they were arranged in a random order. If a primacy effect occurs as in impression formation (Anderson & Barrios, 1961), ordered blocks should elicit more optimistic performance estimates than random or they pressed ENTER without typing an answer to skip the question. In the forced-report block, if participants pressed ENTER without typing in an answer, they were alerted with a prompt requesting them to enter a response, and they could not continue to the next question until they had done so.…”

“…If evaluations of performance on a test are subject to the same sorts of biases as are evaluations of hedonic experiences, postdictions should be higher when the test ends on a set of relatively easy questions. On the other hand, strong primacy effects have been observed in impression formation; for instance, people tend to focus on the first few adjectives used to describe another person when forming a judgment of their character (Anderson & Barrios, 1961). If this primacy effect holds for evaluations of test performance, participants should be more optimistic in their postdictions after taking a test that began with a run of easy questions.…”

Person perception from changing emotional expressions: primacy, recency, or averaging effect?

“…Asch, 1946;Anderson, 1965;Anderson & Barrios, 1961;Forgas, 2011). In the context of person perception, if traits are presented in serial order, the traits that were presented first would thus have a greater influence on the overall impression of the target person than traits that were presented later.…”