Page 113 - The Social Animal

Mass Communication, Propaganda, and Persuasion 95

for a moment. You think: Speaking first may have an advantage because
first impressions are crucial; if I can get the audience on my side early, then
my opponent will not only have to sell himself, he’ll also have to unsell the
audience on me—he’ll be bucking a trend. On the other hand, if I speak
last, I may have an advantage because when the people leave the audito-
rium, they may remember the last thing they heard. The early statements
made by my opponent, no matter how powerful, will be buried by my rhet-
oric simply because my speech will be more memorable. You stammer: “I’d
like to speak first . . . no, last . . . no, first . . . no, wait a minute.”
In confusion, you race off the stage, find a telephone booth, and call
your friend the social psychologist. Surely, she must know which
order has the advantage.
I’m afraid that if you expect a one-word answer, you are in for a
disappointment. Moreover, if you wait to hear all of the social psy-
chologist’s elaborations and qualifying remarks, you might miss the
opportunity of ever delivering your speech at all. Indeed, you might
miss the election itself!
Needless to say, the issue is a complex one involving both learn-
ing and retention. I’ll try to state it as simply as possible. The issues
are similar to the commonsense issues that you, as our hypothetical
politician, pondered alone. It is true that, all other things being equal,
the audience’s memory should be better for the speech made last,
simply because it is closer in time to the election. On the other hand,
the actual learning of the second material will not be as thorough as
the learning of the first material, simply because the very existence
of the first material disrupts and inhibits the learning process. Thus,
from our knowledge of the phenomena of learning, it would appear
that, all other things being equal, the first argument will be more ef-
fective; we’ll call this the primacy effect. But from our knowledge of
the phenomena of retention, on the other hand, it would appear that,
all other things being equal, the last argument will be more effective;
we’ll call this the recency effect.
The fact that these two approaches seemingly involve opposite
predictions does not mean that it doesn’t matter which argument
comes first; nor does it mean that it is hopeless to attempt to make
a definitive prediction. What it does mean is that, by knowing some-
thing about the way both inhibition and retention work, we can pre-
dict the conditions under which either the primacy effect or the
recency effect will prevail. The crucial variable is time—that is, the