Recency effects

Types of Psychology: cognitive, consumer, educational, social, testing and measurement

The position, or order, that items appear in a list affects everything from which results people are likely to click on during a web search, to which brands are remembered after a series of commercials. When presented with a series of items, people are most likely to recall those that appear in the beginning and those that appear in the end. Items that appear in the middle tend to be forgotten. This tendency to remember items that appear at the end of a list is known as the "recency effect."

Introduction: What Are Recency Effects?

There is a saying that history is written by the winners. History, at least in the mind's eye, is also determined by how events are remembered and recorded. Generally speaking, events that happen at the beginning or end of a series are better remembered than those that happen in the middle. This tendency for people to remember things that appear at the beginning of a series is referred to as "primacy effects." The tendency to remember things that appear at the end of a series is known as "recency effects." When given a list of words or items to remember, experimental subjects in the laboratory will largely remember items that appeared at the beginning of the list and items that appeared at the end of the list. This phenomenon has also been demonstrated in the real world in a variety of circumstances including hiring and talent acquisition to performance judging and even food preferences.

What Causes Recency Effects?

It is widely held that memory has two storage resources. One of these resources is permanent and is often referred to as "long-term memory." This is where all permanently retained information is stored. This permanent store contains episodic memory, or memory for life events; semantic memory, which is memory for the meanings of things, and procedural memory, or memory for how to do things such as knowing how to drive a car. The second memory resource is not permanent but acts as a temporary storage mechanism. It is essentially a working buffer used to hold information that may be imminently needed for some task or function. Incoming information first enters the working memory, or short-term store. After use in the short-term buffer, the information is either passed to the permanent long-term store or is lost (i.e., forgotten).

The conventional thinking for a long period was that recency effects occurred because people had fairly easy access to the last few items in a series. In theory, the information was more likely to still be retained in one's working memory. While there it is readily available for recall when a memory test is taken immediately after the series of items. However, new evidence suggests that this is not the case. Indeed, long-term recency effects have been found when there was no possibility for a short-term memory buffer to have contributed information to the recall process. In fact, evidence has shown that there may actually be different properties for recency effects that happen in the short term and those that happen in the long term.

Why Do Recency Effects Matter? Search and Online Behavior

A common practice was for small businesses to name their companies so they would appear at the top of the list in phone books. While printed phone books published by the local phone company (i.e., the Yellow pages) are rapidly becoming obsolete, they were once the only way an individual had to locate a company that provided a certain service. Companies commonly adopted names such as “ABC Plumbing” or “Apple Realty” in order to appear at the top of the list of their given specialty. Without any prior knowledge or specific experience, consumers simply opened the phone book and chose a company, seemingly at random, from there. Not surprisingly, a company that appeared at the top of the list for a given service was far more likely to be chosen than one that appeared farther down. Now that searching for information and services often happens online, there is similar effect of item position when choosing from options on a computer screen. Researchers have found that people are far more likely to choose from a link that appears at the top of the page than one that appears further down: a primacy effect. The popular search engine company Google is aware of this and awards websites with the most number of “hits,” or visitors, on a topic with rank-ordered link placement near the top. However, recent research has shown that online clicking behavior is also affected by recency effects. That is, given a list of about six items in a list of search results, Internet searchers are nearly as likely to click on the very bottom link as they are to click on the link positioned second from the top.

Television Advertising

Television viewers are now less tolerant of advertising and commercials than at any other time in the medium's history. The advent of “on demand” viewing, the astounding number of choices, instant videos available on smart phones, and streaming services that eliminate advertising altogether make commercials more avoidable and less effective. However, there remains one outlet during which television commercials very nearly take center stage: the Super Bowl, for which the role of advertising has taken on a life of its own. Some viewers report only tuning in to witness the airing of commercials. More 110 million American viewers tuned in during the 2016 competition, and advertisers paid the network airing the contest $50 million dollars for just 30-second spots. Super Bowl Ads that appear near the beginning of the broadcast, as well as at the start of a segment of commercials, are far more likely to have their brands recognized. However, recency effects may be more likely to determine which brands viewers recall during normal viewing patterns. Normal TV viewers tend to engage in a strategy of avoiding commercial advertising. This leads them to change channels, engage in conversation, and leave the room once commercials have begun. Furthermore, those who disengage, physically or otherwise, when a commercial segment appears also return just prior to the show's continuation. They are therefore only exposed to advertising that appears when they return at the end of a commercial break. When they do recall brands, they are for products and services for which the advertisements appeared near the end of a commercial break. Therefore, because of the positioning of commercials with respect to one another, those that appear last in this new age of lower ad tolerance are better remembered. The casual viewer can easily observe that networks have caught on to this tendency and tend to place non-product, non-brand, network commercials for new shows and other network events at the very end of an advertising segment.

Judgments of Preference

Food choices. Those measuring food choices have long known the benefit of placing one option in the first position; the first food sample is usually most memorable because it is experienced most strongly. However, more recent findings show that enjoyment of food that appears near the end of a meal when one is satisfied interferes with memories of the initial moments of food consumption. Not only does the memory for the end moments interfere with the initial experience, but these end moments are also more likely to determine when a particular food is consumed once again. That is, if a satisfying meal ends with consumption of a delicious cherry pie, consumers are more likely to remember the dessert portion and are more likely to have cherry pie again soon. Other researchers have found strong recency effects for preferences during a random series of wines during tasting. That is, when sequences of four and five wines were presented, tasters were more likely to rate those that appeared near the end favorably. Primacy effects for the wines were found for both high-knowledge and low-knowledge tasters. However, what is interesting about this tendency for recency effects in wine tasting is that only high-knowledge wine-tasters demonstrated this preference. Low-knowledge wine-tasters only showed a preference for the first wines they tasted. One possibility suggested by the researchers is that those with a lot of experience at wine-tasting may have been using a more rigorous strategy of comparing each wine to the one they had recently deemed as their favorite (usually the one tasted first) and then updating as they proceeded through the sequence of flavors. The recency effect they thus attribute to high-knowledge tasters being more persistent about finding a better wine. Compared to the low-knowledge tasters, they were thus more willing and able expend the extra effort to search for a better wine because of their greater expertise. Interestingly, for all the industry touts the quality and flavor of different wines, the researchers found no difference at all in tasters' preference for any particular wine.

Judging Sports. Preferences for food and drink may seem relatively innocuous, but recency effects have also been found to occur in certain competitive arenas. The Olympic Games are held every four years in either winter or summer domains. It features international competitors in a variety of sports where the outcome is determined by a time-clock, as it is in swimming, bobsledding, and track, and sports where the outcome is determined by judges such as gymnastics, snow-boarding, and figure-skating. Some have argued that “clock sports” are easier to compete in fairly. This is because athletes in sports that are judged obviously have no control over the moods and whims of judges from one contestant to the next. Even the common man knows that extra points are given when competitors “stick the landing.” However, there are many other nuances and subtleties of performance art that judges are expected to appreciate and rate. To have one's career in the hands of a set of judges who have watched countless others before one's own performance or will watch many others after one is finished literally has the potential to change the outcome of the judging.

International figure-skating organizers are presumably aware of this possibility and account for judging differences across a series of competitors by randomizing the order of participant appearance. Contestants are judged over two rounds with a performance near the end of the second round being awarded to those with better scores in the first round. Despite this, however, recency effects persist in international figure-skating judging. That is, skaters whose performance takes place later, near the end of the first round, tend to receive better scores in both the first and final rounds. This is troubling, at best, as contestant fate seems literally in the hands of chance. However, the unavoidable reality is that when judging a serially occurring sequence of performances, judges can only compare the most recent performance to any one that preceded it but cannot compare to any performance that will occur afterward. Recency effects, it seems, are a necessary artifact of certain types of performance and competition.

Finances and Employment. Two other areas in which recency effects can have serious, even grave consequences are employment and financial investments. In terms of employment, primacy and recency effects can influence which job candidates a hiring manager remembers best as well as their first and last impressions of a candidate. Consequently, hiring managers and human resources personnel must use alternative strategies in order to ensure fairer, less biased hiring decisions, such as spacing interviews more widely or rotating the order in which candidates meet with interviewers.

In the realm of finance, investors often look at what has happened most recently in the financial markets when making predictions of how certain assets like stocks or bonds may fair in future. This tends to lead to overvaluations of assets and to widespread investment in assets that have already peaked in performance.

Conclusion

The order that things appear affects everything from whether people will remember them to how well or poorly they are rated. There are a number of things that individuals can do, when armed with this knowledge, to increase their own odds when something important is at stake. During a job interview or other performance rating, present the most favorable information near the end. It is more likely to take precedence as the last thing the other party remembers. This is also the case for any type of presentation and possibly even evidence given during legal proceedings. If you are the recipient of some set of information or data that you need to remember, place the most important portions to study at the beginning or end of the list and/or the beginning or end of the study period. And, if you are judging a series of choices involving preference, you may benefit from a) putting the one you are least likely to prefer at the beginning or end so that it has a fair chance, and b) trying to make pairwise comparisons between items rather than judging every subsequent item based on the first. In addition, formal competition that involves judges viewing a series of contestants might benefit from spreading it out over a longer period so that smaller groups can be judged or from having a larger pool of judges and rotating some judges in and out so that for each competitor, there are a number of judges who are not comparing their performance to every contestant who preceded them.

Bibliography

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