6 ms·

The later we meet someone in a sequence, the more negatively we describe them

286 points by amichail 3y ago

thinkingemote 3y ago
Could be worth mixing this with memory. This study had people rating as they went. If they rated after seeing everyone perhaps the ones later would be less negative?
barbatoast 3y ago
This is why I prefer to do class presentations first
- hawski 3y ago
  In my experience it is fatigue first and failure of the teacher to keep the time limit second.
- catlikesshrimp 3y ago
  hmmm, I used to like to go 2nd back then. The first one might have (mostly) "technical difficulties" that get solved afterwards. The latter you go, the more desperate the group will become. Fatigue and whatnot.
  - dividefuel 3y ago
    Agreed, I like to go in the first ~20% but not actually first. That gives you a chance to quickly make any changes from good qualities you noticed in the first ones, but get it done before fatigue sets in. And it's just nice to have it out of the way so you don't have to stress!
- space_oddity 3y ago
  But you can be forgotten easily
jollyllama 3y ago
Strange, because I have met people who always like the last person they spoke to best.
- unsupp0rted 3y ago
  I think it depends a lot on priming, IQ, memory capacity, ability to notice details, etc. Donald Trump tends to like the last person he spoke to best, but probably because that's the person who comes to mind when asked, and anyway he doesn't really care one way or the other. Unless the topic of conversation was himself: Donald Trump, in which case he cares a lot, will remember details, and will like whichever person said the nicest things about him, regardless of sequencing.
- mathgradthrow 3y ago
  Maybe they weren't speaking to bachelor contestants.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tiffanyh 3y ago
Recency Bias This seems to be the opposite of "recency bias", which is interesting - if true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recency_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recency_bias
- arduanika 3y ago
  Sure, but I learned about this after primacy bias, and now both effects seem very salient to me. I forget if there were others in between.
datavirtue 3y ago
My guess is: familiarity. The first person is part of the algorithm that is applied to all the others, making them more familiar. Familiarity trumps.
patcon 3y ago
Put another way, we have a tendency to like ppl, but once we calibrate, we start penalizing ppl. But without context, we round up. We seek positive attributes first before resorting to negative, and only in aggregate. It's a local-first favouring tactic. local networks (maybe small-world) are maybe more stabilized by the up-rounding. Or maybe it's also more about calibration over time. Most of our social technology is about not being shitty to one another at scale (or maybe "in massive sequence"), so this seems aligned with my understanding of the world. The work of progress is to "not be shitty" at increasing scale (of population, idea complexity, levels of abstraction), and we build institutions that mostly try to do that. Though I think digital has kinda failed on that mission lately, which is another conversation Seems kinda nice and adaptive and optimistic even. Though yes, downsides in a society that lives at scale, if not mitigated by process or social/digital tech.
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago
  [dead]
- coldtea 3y ago
  >Put another way, we have a tendency to like ppl, but once we calibrate, we start penalizing ppl. But without context, we round up. Put it another way: we're shallow, primitive, creatures.
  - sctb 3y ago
    If that's true then I would put even less stock into these just-so stories.
  - patcon 3y ago
    Heh I like the sentiment, but this feels to me a little bit odd, like saying "evolution is a cold ruthless inhumane process". There is no human (the root of all things "humane") without the evolution being critiqued by the very human values it made possible :) What you're calling "primitive" (perhaps with judgement) is part of the system that perpetuates our collective socio-biological process in poorly understood ways. For all we know, liking ppl until we're at scale is highly adaptive (in an information-theoretic sense) for sociality as a whole, and not some broken primitivity :)
freitzkriesler2 3y ago
Unrelated but sort of not. If you can don't ever do a job interview after lunch on a Friday. It will never go well. No one wants to be there and is thinking about the weekend.
yumraj 3y ago
Hmm… I would think that there are two forces at play here: 1) the ones who come first are not compared against any of the latter ones, so make a better impression 2) the ones who come last are still in memory, especially if results are all tabulated in the end. So, if the above is true, and there is no guarantee that it is, I would have expected an inverted bell curve.
abeppu 3y ago
I think a flip side I've seen is when the first applicant through an interview loop has basically no chance of getting an offer because (a) people know they're not calibrated and (b) "surely the odds are low that the very first person would be the right person" This kinda means it's a waste of the candidate's time unless they're _also_ just interviewing for practice.
- unsupp0rted 3y ago
  Multiple times I've been the first candidate in an interview loop (out of say 3 or 4 candidates) and gotten picked.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    Yes, it works as long as it’s a batch. Won’t work if the next candidate they see is 15 days later.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - mym1990 3y ago
      This is likely only because the initial candidate was already thrown out of the pool, so the 15 day later candidate might as well become first in line at that point.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  It really depends. A lot of teams don't want to waste their time reviewing a bunch of candidates and will pick the first person who impresses them. Not saying they won't go through with whatever other interviews they had scheduled, but if the first person knocks it out of the park and the remaining 3 candidates who make it through the interview cycle that week are less impressive, they'll just make an offer to the first person rather than continue interviewing
- axus 3y ago
  Reminds me of the old trope, "We wouldn't want to hire someone with bad luck."
mxkopy 3y ago
I wonder if this is more due to the pressure to be descriptive than because of any sort of internal dialogue. If I’m being asked to do a study I feel that I need to contribute by adding something ‘new’ and ‘substantive’ for each question (which ultimately leads to choosing negative qualities to describe a person), but if I weren’t expected to have an answer I would’ve had more boring thoughts about the questions.
airstrike 3y ago
At Kellogg they used to say it's best to either be the first to be interviewed or the last—assuming you're a decent candidate and well prepared to begin with. First because you set the benchmark, and your outstanding qualities become "requirements" for the candidates that follow to meet that benchmark. Last because of recency bias, so whatever qualities you have are better recalled by interviewers. Everyone else becomes somewhat forgettable. (I would guess they mentioned a study about it, but it's been 10 years and I don't have the reference handy.) In my experience as an interviewer, everyone in the middle does get somewhat mixed up together, especially when I had less than 5 minutes to scribble notes and reset between candidates. But I would modify "first" and "last" to "towards the start" and "towards the end" e.g., I will (subconsciously) more easily benchmark candidates against a very strong "second interview of the day" than against a lackluster "very first candidate", if that makes sense. Said differently, whoever is the first candidate that hits it out of the park becomes the benchmark. And whoever happens to be the best relatively strong candidate is more easily recalled than other relatively strong candidates. Thank you for coming to my TED talk
- 6510 3y ago
  [flagged]
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  now to make it interesting, place the middle candidates right after lunch to see if having lunch improves the middle stretch
- bschne 3y ago
  (how) do you (try to) correct for this with interviews?
  - OJFord 3y ago
    Someone's bound to mention it in this thread (or I hope they do, because I thought it was great but can't remember the name or the details) - but there's some formula that's roughly like: N = total applicants 1. Interview N/10, decline no matter what 2. Hire the next person who's better than everyone seen so far As I recall it was slightly more complex than that, perhaps only to give it an impression of being rigorous theory, but that was the gist of it.
samatman 3y ago
I question describing this as a cognitive bias, let alone an unconscious one, and the experimental protocol used here is awful for attempting to show that it is. The examples they give: Job interviews, dating, auditions, are all cases of search for the best out of a set of possibilities. The earliest candidates have the initial advantage of there being few in the set, or none, for the first candidate. Since the purpose is to compare the entire set, by definition, the first one is the best you've seen. Even if they objectively aren't great, the rating at that time will tend to be more positive. That isn't a bias, it's a best-effort judgement in the face of incomplete information. You'd need a crystal ball not to do this. What they're measuring is immediate impressions, while what they should be measuring is decisions made after the search concludes. I've certainly had the experience of interviewing a candidate for a job and telling myself "yeah, might be ok", then a later candidate comes by and I adjust that to "no, this one is much better". If they want to show that being first or early in such a sequence makes it more likely someone will get picked, they've failed to do so with this protocol.
- thereticent 3y ago
  I can't tell from the linked article whether the ratings/descriptions were made immediately, but if so you are correct. It's just not applicable to those examples. This only applies in a "hired on the spot" type of evaluation. I'm a psychologist, and though HN usually tends to be tough on psychology as a science, I'm amazed that this paper is being discussed so earnestly. Social science in particular should require a bit more skepticism.
- eszed 3y ago
  I had the same thought regarding decisions vs impressions. For what it's worth, my preference during my time as a working actor was to audition first thing after lunch. I figured (based largely on my own experiences as an auditor) that the first people in the day would be forgotten / calibrated against, and those later in the morning would be victims of fatigue, whereas directly after lunch I'd have the best chance to make the best impression on fresh auditors. I had objectively excellent rates of success, so figured that method was good enough. <shrug> I don't think that generalizes to more extensive interview processes. Auditions are weird: you get a "hello", then five minutes (max) to do two monologues, or one monologue and a song. It's basically a cattle-call, and very hard to stand out. Sometimes the "hello" is actually the most important thing, sometimes what you're wearing is what makes the best impression. As an actor you have essentially zero control, and yet that gives you utter and complete freedom. Still: first thing after lunch. Works every time, except when it doesn't.
mathgradthrow 3y ago
Alternate explanation. The more bachelor contestants you watch, the more patterns of shitty behavior you identify. One could conceive of a more representative population than influencers trying to make money on the bachelor.
tqi 3y ago
> The participants described the first few individuals quite positively, using an average of 6.2 positive words each. But as they progressed through the sequence, their descriptions became significantly more negative, dipping to an average of just 4.7 positive words by the 20th person. I don't have access to the study, but I'd be curious why they chose to count positive words as opposed to just asking people to rate on a numerical scale? My impression is that sentiment scoring via bag-of-words is not a particularly robust method, especially in 2024. It also sounds like they didn't normalize by description length, so outcome could just as easily be because people's responses got shorter as time went on due to fatigue? (also, this is a nit with the article rather than the study, but given the methodology I think it is important to distinguish between becoming less positive and becoming more negative, and in this case I would not describe using fewer positive words as "became significantly more negative")
- balderdash 3y ago
  Yeah - antidotally I feel like earlier in a hiring process people are apt to expound on candidates fit for portions of the role and in later stages it basically just thumbs up or down and only more exposition in the case of disagreement
  - CRConrad 3y ago
    What do you need an antidote against? (“Anecdotally”, I think.)
    - hinkley 3y ago
      Maybe this is why some companies have hierarchical hiring processes. The first round is a basic filter. By the time you get to the final round you're only thinking about a dozen people.
  - p1necone 3y ago
    Yeah, when you don't have anything to compare them with you need to describe them. But once you have some strong candidates to compare them with everyone just becomes "are they better or worse than X".
xyzelement 3y ago
A related concept I noticed is that we are "wired" to identify with whoever is presented as the protagonist, even when the information is readily available to recognize them as the antagonist. EG - I recently watched Peter Pan for the first time, as an adult. Peter is basically a horrible person who deludes and kidnaps children, puts them in incredibly dangerous situations, doesn't care about people other than to make himself look good (eg, he fought the pirates who had kidnapped the Indian princess, then he got so distracted w himself she nearly drowned in the tide). On the other hand, we're told that Hook and the pirates are the bad guys but really Hook is just responding to the fact that Peter had maimed him and fed his hand to a crocodile. There's no indication of anything bad Hook has done prior or since, other than trying to "get" Peter for having done that. The protagonist of Peter Pan is actually the dad who was trying to protect the kids from nonsense but even he got derailed by the wife, therefore leaving the kids vulnerable to all that has happened to them. But if you ask most people who are familiar with the story, they'll react to the superficial presentation that Pan is whimsical and aspirational for children while the Dad represents the dull adult world to be escaped from, or something like that. The crux is that the narrative form suggests how we should feel about whom even if that makes no sense. I think this is what the article here is talking about as well in a different manifestation.
- b112 3y ago
  While I get what you're saying, context counts. Hook is a pirate. By definition, that's a murdering, raping thief, whos main income is boarding honest ships, slaughtering their crew, etc. Piracy is/was punishable by death. The story is old, but at the time written, anyone would be a hero for maiming, or killing a pirate.
  - CrazyStat 3y ago
    > The story is old, but at the time written, anyone would be a hero for maiming, or killing a pirate. I’m going to contest this. Peter Pan first appeared in 1902[1], by which time the romanticization of pirates was well under way. The Pirates of Penzance, for example, debuted in 1879[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_White_Bird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_White_Bird [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance
greatgib 3y ago
Imagine the huge impact this has on the fairness of jugement in trials? Especially in current time where justice is understaffed and judges have to work long hours... This is quite scary in my opinion.
faeriechangling 3y ago
I'll hold my breath until I see this result replicated a few times using different methods. This reminds me a lot of https://datacolada.org/98 https://datacolada.org/98 and if I think about it, the data would be trivial to fake.
willmadden 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
cushpush 3y ago
First Come First Served?
- dumbfounder 3y ago
  First In Last Out.
sciencesama 3y ago
Familiarity brings fondness !!
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> To test this, the researchers conducted a number of studies. In one, they had 992 participants (recruited from Prolific Academic) describe 20 people based on their Facebook profile pictures. Alternative interpretation: Paid participants who most likely just want to do the study and get paid get more and more cranky the more pointless words they have to write about unknown people’s Facebook profiles. How well this actually reflects phenomenon in the real world is actually unknown.
ekianjo 3y ago
> You’re just as qualified and just as talented as those who went before you. there is no such thing as people with identical profiles
quotemstr 3y ago
This is exactly the sort of popular-psychology thing that fails to replicate, isn't it? I'm pattern-matching it against "ego depletion" and the hungry-judge theory, both of which failed to replicate.
- kjqgqkejbfefn 3y ago
  No this is well studied, although you're right this is a "popular-psychology thing" since ctrl+f "anchoring" returns nothing in the discussed study paper. See: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decision-making/article/anchoring-without-scale-distortion/A12E8F70D44F7BD78344198E5BF7810B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decisio... >A number of studies have shown the robustness of the anchoring effect. Anchors can influence judgment even after weeks or months (Reference MussweilerMussweiler, 2001; Reference Yoon, Fong and DimokaYoon & Fong, 2019). The anchoring effect is present even in experts in the judgmental domain (Reference Englich and MussweilerEnglich & Mussweiler, 2001; Reference Englich, Mussweiler and StrackEnglich et al., 2006). An anchor can influence subsequent judgment even if it is clearly implausible (Reference Strack and MussweilerStrack & Mussweiler, 1997) or when it is compared to a different object (Reference Frederick and MochonFrederick & Mochon, 2012; Reference Mochon and FrederickMochon & Frederick, 2013).
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  Well, crap. My next interview with a major CPU manufacturer is (drum roll) this Friday afternoon. Here's hoping someone with a backhoe doesn't check for fiber conduits.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  I too take an absolutely defensive attitude towards results like these which don't get replicated half the time and are trivial to fake. I'm full on "assume it's fake or bunk until proven otherwise" when it comes to behavioural psychology because the field has such systemic integrity and reproducibility problems. There's no real systemic replication or anti-fraud efforts so why should I trust anything coming from this field? I'm not trusting any result like this unless it comes from a meta-analysis really. I have heard of this general idea before, that the first and last to interview are more likely to get a job, but the plausibility of the finding doesn't make it any less suspect.
sebastianconcpt 3y ago
I'll put this over here and slowly and silently walk backwards... Makes me wonder if the function wouldn't end up being like hypergamy. Makes me wonder (as a follow up) if turns up to be like hypergamy, then there is a link between human economics and sexual behavioral drivers.
Exoristos 3y ago
Let's be clear that this was a sequence of unpleasant characters. A reality-TV game show is not the same as a sequence of job interviews. There may not be much to extrapolate here.
nkurz 3y ago
A version of the full paper seems to be available here: https://osf.io/s2zv8/download/?format=pdf https://osf.io/s2zv8/download/?format=pdf
karaterobot 3y ago
Would love to see this get reproduced. Until then, I'm not sold. Feels like people have been arranging themselves in sequence for hundreds of thousands of years at least; you'd think somebody would have noticed if this effect were strong enough to be measured.
- lesostep 3y ago
  It's an anecdote data, but a lot of concert/animecon/othercon people around me knew of similar effect for years. The opening acts and the last acts are the most sought-after acts for performers because they are the most memorable and on average rated more highly
User23 3y ago
I wonder if this explains some of the data correlating promiscuity with divorce.
xyst 3y ago
In a rapid fire succession, I can see this happening. I personally call this “I just want to get this over with” bias. In an interview setting, I have never completed more than 1-2 interviews in a single day so this doesn’t apply. Maybe hiring managers or recruiters have this bias more than me.
Aeglaecia 3y ago
[flagged]
- acdha 3y ago
  HN doesn’t need casual sexism and that’s just going to derail a more substantial conversation.
  - Aeglaecia 3y ago
    look ill admit its abrasive but you may wanna look up the correlation between partner count and divorce rate
alekseiprokopev 3y ago
Maybe it is somehow connected to so called "Baby duck syndrome" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)#Baby_duck_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)#Baby_d...
kjqgqkejbfefn 3y ago
This is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect More specifically, sequential anchoring: >Consider the following scenario: A reviewer evaluates many unqualified applicants for a university program successively, and the next applicant to be reviewed is an average (borderline admit-reject) applicant. Because the evaluator is influenced, or anchored, by recently made decisions, this borderline applicant might be admitted to the program. On the other hand, when an evaluator is anchored by having reviewed many qualified applicants, the same or a similarly borderline applicant might be rejected (Figure 1). In this scenario, individual fairness, stating that individuals with similar characteristics should be treated similarly [8], is impaired, and wrong or inconsistent decisions can have a consequential impact. Source: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3491102.3517443 https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3491102.3517443
kjqgqkejbfefn 3y ago
Also this threads needs a touch of AI, we're on HN ! >AI-Moderated Decision-Making: Capturing and Balancing Anchoring Bias in Sequential Decision Tasks https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3491102.3517443 https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3491102.3517443
gumby 3y ago
I changed my name when marrying and moved from the end of the alphabet to the middle. I wondered what effect it would have: am I now more likely to get a cookie before they run out? But what if it’s bullets — they should run out before they get to me. Spoiler: I’ve not been able to notice any difference.
zaphirplane 3y ago
Not a single comment on how this applies to dating or marriage. I get the sequence is within a short period of time
anon115 3y ago
does the same thing happen with dating?
dkarras 3y ago
This was kinda known I think. I remember also reading about blood sugar levels and risk taking behavior. If you are interviewing / auditioning just before people's lunch time, tough luck. They are decision fatigued, hungry, low blood sugar so their risk taking threshold is significantly higher than how it was when they started, so if they thought there were promising candidates from when they were fresh, well rested and not hungry, it is unlikely that you will surpass them even if you are objectively better. If you are their first after the lunch however, that would again be a very good spot.
space_oddity 3y ago
This is why we must stand out in some way, for example, to a future employer when applying for a job through a big competition. And how important luck is in many similar situations. Therefore, winning a competition, as well as getting or not getting a certain position, does not define you

286 points by amichail 3y ago

Could be worth mixing this with memory. This study had people rating as they went. If they rated after seeing everyone perhaps the ones later would be less negative?

barbatoast 3y ago

This is why I prefer to do class presentations first

hawski 3y ago
In my experience it is fatigue first and failure of the teacher to keep the time limit second.
catlikesshrimp 3y ago
hmmm, I used to like to go 2nd back then. The first one might have (mostly) "technical difficulties" that get solved afterwards. The latter you go, the more desperate the group will become. Fatigue and whatnot.
- dividefuel 3y ago
  Agreed, I like to go in the first ~20% but not actually first. That gives you a chance to quickly make any changes from good qualities you noticed in the first ones, but get it done before fatigue sets in. And it's just nice to have it out of the way so you don't have to stress!
space_oddity 3y ago
But you can be forgotten easily

jollyllama 3y ago

Strange, because I have met people who always like the last person they spoke to best.

unsupp0rted 3y ago
I think it depends a lot on priming, IQ, memory capacity, ability to notice details, etc. Donald Trump tends to like the last person he spoke to best, but probably because that's the person who comes to mind when asked, and anyway he doesn't really care one way or the other. Unless the topic of conversation was himself: Donald Trump, in which case he cares a lot, will remember details, and will like whichever person said the nicest things about him, regardless of sequencing.
mathgradthrow 3y ago
Maybe they weren't speaking to bachelor contestants.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tiffanyh 3y ago

Recency Bias This seems to be the opposite of "recency bias", which is interesting - if true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recency_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recency_bias

arduanika 3y ago
Sure, but I learned about this after primacy bias, and now both effects seem very salient to me. I forget if there were others in between.

datavirtue 3y ago

My guess is: familiarity. The first person is part of the algorithm that is applied to all the others, making them more familiar. Familiarity trumps.

patcon 3y ago

Put another way, we have a tendency to like ppl, but once we calibrate, we start penalizing ppl. But without context, we round up. We seek positive attributes first before resorting to negative, and only in aggregate. It's a local-first favouring tactic. local networks (maybe small-world) are maybe more stabilized by the up-rounding. Or maybe it's also more about calibration over time. Most of our social technology is about not being shitty to one another at scale (or maybe "in massive sequence"), so this seems aligned with my understanding of the world. The work of progress is to "not be shitty" at increasing scale (of population, idea complexity, levels of abstraction), and we build institutions that mostly try to do that. Though I think digital has kinda failed on that mission lately, which is another conversation Seems kinda nice and adaptive and optimistic even. Though yes, downsides in a society that lives at scale, if not mitigated by process or social/digital tech.

Slava_Propanei 3y ago
[dead]
coldtea 3y ago
>Put another way, we have a tendency to like ppl, but once we calibrate, we start penalizing ppl. But without context, we round up. Put it another way: we're shallow, primitive, creatures.
- sctb 3y ago
  If that's true then I would put even less stock into these just-so stories.
- patcon 3y ago
  Heh I like the sentiment, but this feels to me a little bit odd, like saying "evolution is a cold ruthless inhumane process". There is no human (the root of all things "humane") without the evolution being critiqued by the very human values it made possible :) What you're calling "primitive" (perhaps with judgement) is part of the system that perpetuates our collective socio-biological process in poorly understood ways. For all we know, liking ppl until we're at scale is highly adaptive (in an information-theoretic sense) for sociality as a whole, and not some broken primitivity :)

freitzkriesler2 3y ago

Unrelated but sort of not. If you can don't ever do a job interview after lunch on a Friday. It will never go well. No one wants to be there and is thinking about the weekend.

yumraj 3y ago

Hmm… I would think that there are two forces at play here: 1) the ones who come first are not compared against any of the latter ones, so make a better impression 2) the ones who come last are still in memory, especially if results are all tabulated in the end. So, if the above is true, and there is no guarantee that it is, I would have expected an inverted bell curve.

abeppu 3y ago

I think a flip side I've seen is when the first applicant through an interview loop has basically no chance of getting an offer because (a) people know they're not calibrated and (b) "surely the odds are low that the very first person would be the right person" This kinda means it's a waste of the candidate's time unless they're _also_ just interviewing for practice.

unsupp0rted 3y ago
Multiple times I've been the first candidate in an interview loop (out of say 3 or 4 candidates) and gotten picked.
- eastbound 3y ago
  Yes, it works as long as it’s a batch. Won’t work if the next candidate they see is 15 days later.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - mym1990 3y ago
    This is likely only because the initial candidate was already thrown out of the pool, so the 15 day later candidate might as well become first in line at that point.
pcthrowaway 3y ago
It really depends. A lot of teams don't want to waste their time reviewing a bunch of candidates and will pick the first person who impresses them. Not saying they won't go through with whatever other interviews they had scheduled, but if the first person knocks it out of the park and the remaining 3 candidates who make it through the interview cycle that week are less impressive, they'll just make an offer to the first person rather than continue interviewing
axus 3y ago
Reminds me of the old trope, "We wouldn't want to hire someone with bad luck."

mxkopy 3y ago

I wonder if this is more due to the pressure to be descriptive than because of any sort of internal dialogue. If I’m being asked to do a study I feel that I need to contribute by adding something ‘new’ and ‘substantive’ for each question (which ultimately leads to choosing negative qualities to describe a person), but if I weren’t expected to have an answer I would’ve had more boring thoughts about the questions.

airstrike 3y ago

At Kellogg they used to say it's best to either be the first to be interviewed or the last—assuming you're a decent candidate and well prepared to begin with. First because you set the benchmark, and your outstanding qualities become "requirements" for the candidates that follow to meet that benchmark. Last because of recency bias, so whatever qualities you have are better recalled by interviewers. Everyone else becomes somewhat forgettable. (I would guess they mentioned a study about it, but it's been 10 years and I don't have the reference handy.) In my experience as an interviewer, everyone in the middle does get somewhat mixed up together, especially when I had less than 5 minutes to scribble notes and reset between candidates. But I would modify "first" and "last" to "towards the start" and "towards the end" e.g., I will (subconsciously) more easily benchmark candidates against a very strong "second interview of the day" than against a lackluster "very first candidate", if that makes sense. Said differently, whoever is the first candidate that hits it out of the park becomes the benchmark. And whoever happens to be the best relatively strong candidate is more easily recalled than other relatively strong candidates. Thank you for coming to my TED talk

6510 3y ago
[flagged]
cyanydeez 3y ago
now to make it interesting, place the middle candidates right after lunch to see if having lunch improves the middle stretch
bschne 3y ago
(how) do you (try to) correct for this with interviews?
- OJFord 3y ago
  Someone's bound to mention it in this thread (or I hope they do, because I thought it was great but can't remember the name or the details) - but there's some formula that's roughly like: N = total applicants 1. Interview N/10, decline no matter what 2. Hire the next person who's better than everyone seen so far As I recall it was slightly more complex than that, perhaps only to give it an impression of being rigorous theory, but that was the gist of it.

samatman 3y ago

I question describing this as a cognitive bias, let alone an unconscious one, and the experimental protocol used here is awful for attempting to show that it is. The examples they give: Job interviews, dating, auditions, are all cases of search for the best out of a set of possibilities. The earliest candidates have the initial advantage of there being few in the set, or none, for the first candidate. Since the purpose is to compare the entire set, by definition, the first one is the best you've seen. Even if they objectively aren't great, the rating at that time will tend to be more positive. That isn't a bias, it's a best-effort judgement in the face of incomplete information. You'd need a crystal ball not to do this. What they're measuring is immediate impressions, while what they should be measuring is decisions made after the search concludes. I've certainly had the experience of interviewing a candidate for a job and telling myself "yeah, might be ok", then a later candidate comes by and I adjust that to "no, this one is much better". If they want to show that being first or early in such a sequence makes it more likely someone will get picked, they've failed to do so with this protocol.

thereticent 3y ago
I can't tell from the linked article whether the ratings/descriptions were made immediately, but if so you are correct. It's just not applicable to those examples. This only applies in a "hired on the spot" type of evaluation. I'm a psychologist, and though HN usually tends to be tough on psychology as a science, I'm amazed that this paper is being discussed so earnestly. Social science in particular should require a bit more skepticism.
eszed 3y ago
I had the same thought regarding decisions vs impressions. For what it's worth, my preference during my time as a working actor was to audition first thing after lunch. I figured (based largely on my own experiences as an auditor) that the first people in the day would be forgotten / calibrated against, and those later in the morning would be victims of fatigue, whereas directly after lunch I'd have the best chance to make the best impression on fresh auditors. I had objectively excellent rates of success, so figured that method was good enough. <shrug> I don't think that generalizes to more extensive interview processes. Auditions are weird: you get a "hello", then five minutes (max) to do two monologues, or one monologue and a song. It's basically a cattle-call, and very hard to stand out. Sometimes the "hello" is actually the most important thing, sometimes what you're wearing is what makes the best impression. As an actor you have essentially zero control, and yet that gives you utter and complete freedom. Still: first thing after lunch. Works every time, except when it doesn't.

mathgradthrow 3y ago

Alternate explanation. The more bachelor contestants you watch, the more patterns of shitty behavior you identify. One could conceive of a more representative population than influencers trying to make money on the bachelor.

tqi 3y ago

> The participants described the first few individuals quite positively, using an average of 6.2 positive words each. But as they progressed through the sequence, their descriptions became significantly more negative, dipping to an average of just 4.7 positive words by the 20th person. I don't have access to the study, but I'd be curious why they chose to count positive words as opposed to just asking people to rate on a numerical scale? My impression is that sentiment scoring via bag-of-words is not a particularly robust method, especially in 2024. It also sounds like they didn't normalize by description length, so outcome could just as easily be because people's responses got shorter as time went on due to fatigue? (also, this is a nit with the article rather than the study, but given the methodology I think it is important to distinguish between becoming less positive and becoming more negative, and in this case I would not describe using fewer positive words as "became significantly more negative")

balderdash 3y ago
Yeah - antidotally I feel like earlier in a hiring process people are apt to expound on candidates fit for portions of the role and in later stages it basically just thumbs up or down and only more exposition in the case of disagreement
- CRConrad 3y ago
  What do you need an antidote against? (“Anecdotally”, I think.)
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Maybe this is why some companies have hierarchical hiring processes. The first round is a basic filter. By the time you get to the final round you're only thinking about a dozen people.
- p1necone 3y ago
  Yeah, when you don't have anything to compare them with you need to describe them. But once you have some strong candidates to compare them with everyone just becomes "are they better or worse than X".

xyzelement 3y ago

A related concept I noticed is that we are "wired" to identify with whoever is presented as the protagonist, even when the information is readily available to recognize them as the antagonist. EG - I recently watched Peter Pan for the first time, as an adult. Peter is basically a horrible person who deludes and kidnaps children, puts them in incredibly dangerous situations, doesn't care about people other than to make himself look good (eg, he fought the pirates who had kidnapped the Indian princess, then he got so distracted w himself she nearly drowned in the tide). On the other hand, we're told that Hook and the pirates are the bad guys but really Hook is just responding to the fact that Peter had maimed him and fed his hand to a crocodile. There's no indication of anything bad Hook has done prior or since, other than trying to "get" Peter for having done that. The protagonist of Peter Pan is actually the dad who was trying to protect the kids from nonsense but even he got derailed by the wife, therefore leaving the kids vulnerable to all that has happened to them. But if you ask most people who are familiar with the story, they'll react to the superficial presentation that Pan is whimsical and aspirational for children while the Dad represents the dull adult world to be escaped from, or something like that. The crux is that the narrative form suggests how we should feel about whom even if that makes no sense. I think this is what the article here is talking about as well in a different manifestation.

b112 3y ago
While I get what you're saying, context counts. Hook is a pirate. By definition, that's a murdering, raping thief, whos main income is boarding honest ships, slaughtering their crew, etc. Piracy is/was punishable by death. The story is old, but at the time written, anyone would be a hero for maiming, or killing a pirate.
- CrazyStat 3y ago
  > The story is old, but at the time written, anyone would be a hero for maiming, or killing a pirate. I’m going to contest this. Peter Pan first appeared in 1902[1], by which time the romanticization of pirates was well under way. The Pirates of Penzance, for example, debuted in 1879[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_White_Bird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_White_Bird [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance

greatgib 3y ago

Imagine the huge impact this has on the fairness of jugement in trials? Especially in current time where justice is understaffed and judges have to work long hours... This is quite scary in my opinion.

faeriechangling 3y ago

I'll hold my breath until I see this result replicated a few times using different methods. This reminds me a lot of https://datacolada.org/98 https://datacolada.org/98 and if I think about it, the data would be trivial to fake.

willmadden 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
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cushpush 3y ago

First Come First Served?

dumbfounder 3y ago
First In Last Out.

sciencesama 3y ago

Familiarity brings fondness !!

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

> To test this, the researchers conducted a number of studies. In one, they had 992 participants (recruited from Prolific Academic) describe 20 people based on their Facebook profile pictures. Alternative interpretation: Paid participants who most likely just want to do the study and get paid get more and more cranky the more pointless words they have to write about unknown people’s Facebook profiles. How well this actually reflects phenomenon in the real world is actually unknown.

ekianjo 3y ago

> You’re just as qualified and just as talented as those who went before you. there is no such thing as people with identical profiles

quotemstr 3y ago

This is exactly the sort of popular-psychology thing that fails to replicate, isn't it? I'm pattern-matching it against "ego depletion" and the hungry-judge theory, both of which failed to replicate.

kjqgqkejbfefn 3y ago
No this is well studied, although you're right this is a "popular-psychology thing" since ctrl+f "anchoring" returns nothing in the discussed study paper. See: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decision-making/article/anchoring-without-scale-distortion/A12E8F70D44F7BD78344198E5BF7810B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decisio... >A number of studies have shown the robustness of the anchoring effect. Anchors can influence judgment even after weeks or months (Reference MussweilerMussweiler, 2001; Reference Yoon, Fong and DimokaYoon & Fong, 2019). The anchoring effect is present even in experts in the judgmental domain (Reference Englich and MussweilerEnglich & Mussweiler, 2001; Reference Englich, Mussweiler and StrackEnglich et al., 2006). An anchor can influence subsequent judgment even if it is clearly implausible (Reference Strack and MussweilerStrack & Mussweiler, 1997) or when it is compared to a different object (Reference Frederick and MochonFrederick & Mochon, 2012; Reference Mochon and FrederickMochon & Frederick, 2013).
CoastalCoder 3y ago
Well, crap. My next interview with a major CPU manufacturer is (drum roll) this Friday afternoon. Here's hoping someone with a backhoe doesn't check for fiber conduits.
faeriechangling 3y ago
I too take an absolutely defensive attitude towards results like these which don't get replicated half the time and are trivial to fake. I'm full on "assume it's fake or bunk until proven otherwise" when it comes to behavioural psychology because the field has such systemic integrity and reproducibility problems. There's no real systemic replication or anti-fraud efforts so why should I trust anything coming from this field? I'm not trusting any result like this unless it comes from a meta-analysis really. I have heard of this general idea before, that the first and last to interview are more likely to get a job, but the plausibility of the finding doesn't make it any less suspect.

sebastianconcpt 3y ago

I'll put this over here and slowly and silently walk backwards... Makes me wonder if the function wouldn't end up being like hypergamy. Makes me wonder (as a follow up) if turns up to be like hypergamy, then there is a link between human economics and sexual behavioral drivers.

Exoristos 3y ago

Let's be clear that this was a sequence of unpleasant characters. A reality-TV game show is not the same as a sequence of job interviews. There may not be much to extrapolate here.

nkurz 3y ago

A version of the full paper seems to be available here: https://osf.io/s2zv8/download/?format=pdf https://osf.io/s2zv8/download/?format=pdf

karaterobot 3y ago

Would love to see this get reproduced. Until then, I'm not sold. Feels like people have been arranging themselves in sequence for hundreds of thousands of years at least; you'd think somebody would have noticed if this effect were strong enough to be measured.

lesostep 3y ago
It's an anecdote data, but a lot of concert/animecon/othercon people around me knew of similar effect for years. The opening acts and the last acts are the most sought-after acts for performers because they are the most memorable and on average rated more highly

User23 3y ago

I wonder if this explains some of the data correlating promiscuity with divorce.

xyst 3y ago

In a rapid fire succession, I can see this happening. I personally call this “I just want to get this over with” bias. In an interview setting, I have never completed more than 1-2 interviews in a single day so this doesn’t apply. Maybe hiring managers or recruiters have this bias more than me.

Aeglaecia 3y ago

[flagged]

acdha 3y ago
HN doesn’t need casual sexism and that’s just going to derail a more substantial conversation.
- Aeglaecia 3y ago
  look ill admit its abrasive but you may wanna look up the correlation between partner count and divorce rate

alekseiprokopev 3y ago

Maybe it is somehow connected to so called "Baby duck syndrome" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)#Baby_duck_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)#Baby_d...

kjqgqkejbfefn 3y ago

This is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect More specifically, sequential anchoring: >Consider the following scenario: A reviewer evaluates many unqualified applicants for a university program successively, and the next applicant to be reviewed is an average (borderline admit-reject) applicant. Because the evaluator is influenced, or anchored, by recently made decisions, this borderline applicant might be admitted to the program. On the other hand, when an evaluator is anchored by having reviewed many qualified applicants, the same or a similarly borderline applicant might be rejected (Figure 1). In this scenario, individual fairness, stating that individuals with similar characteristics should be treated similarly [8], is impaired, and wrong or inconsistent decisions can have a consequential impact. Source: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3491102.3517443 https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3491102.3517443

kjqgqkejbfefn 3y ago

Also this threads needs a touch of AI, we're on HN ! >AI-Moderated Decision-Making: Capturing and Balancing Anchoring Bias in Sequential Decision Tasks https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3491102.3517443 https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3491102.3517443

gumby 3y ago

I changed my name when marrying and moved from the end of the alphabet to the middle. I wondered what effect it would have: am I now more likely to get a cookie before they run out? But what if it’s bullets — they should run out before they get to me. Spoiler: I’ve not been able to notice any difference.

zaphirplane 3y ago

Not a single comment on how this applies to dating or marriage. I get the sequence is within a short period of time

anon115 3y ago

does the same thing happen with dating?

dkarras 3y ago

This was kinda known I think. I remember also reading about blood sugar levels and risk taking behavior. If you are interviewing / auditioning just before people's lunch time, tough luck. They are decision fatigued, hungry, low blood sugar so their risk taking threshold is significantly higher than how it was when they started, so if they thought there were promising candidates from when they were fresh, well rested and not hungry, it is unlikely that you will surpass them even if you are objectively better. If you are their first after the lunch however, that would again be a very good spot.

space_oddity 3y ago

This is why we must stand out in some way, for example, to a future employer when applying for a job through a big competition. And how important luck is in many similar situations. Therefore, winning a competition, as well as getting or not getting a certain position, does not define you