Page 150 - The Social Animal

132 The Social Animal

stressing the negative consequences were significantly more likely to
perform breast self-examination. How you frame a decision can make
a big difference in a life-and-death situation.

The Ordering of Information Another factor influencing the
way we organize and interpret the social world is the manner in
which information is arranged and distributed. Let’s look at two
characteristics of the way information is presented and their effects
on social judgment: (1) what comes first, and (2) the amount of in-
formation given.

The Primacy Effect and Impression Formation In the
preceding chapter, we discussed the order of presentation for persua-
sive arguments— that is, in a debate, the conditions under which it
is more effective to state one’s arguments first (primacy effect) or last
(recency effect).When it comes to forming impressions of other peo-
ple, however, there is not much of a contest: With few exceptions,
the old saw “Put your best foot forward” turns out to be accurate; the
things we learn first about a person have a decisive impact on our
judgment of that person. In a pioneering experiment, Solomon Asch
demonstrated the power of the primacy effect in impression forma-
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tion. In Asch’s study, subjects received descriptive sentences such as
the following and then were asked to rate the person described in
each sentence.

a. Steve is intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn,
and envious.
b. Steve is envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, and
intelligent.
Note that the two sentences contain exactly the same informa-
tion about Steve; however, sentence (a) puts the positive traits first,
whereas sentence (b) puts them last. Asch found that Steve was rated
more positively when he was described by sentence (a) than by sen-
tence (b)—a primacy effect.
Asch’s original finding has been repeated many times in many
ways. For example, in experiments by Edward Jones and his col-
leagues, research participants observed another individual performing
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a series of 30 intelligence test items. In each case, the person an-