Page 151 - The Social Animal

Social Cognition 133

swered 15 of the 30 questions correctly. However, sometimes the per-
son started out “hot”—that is, answering a lot of questions correctly
at the beginning—and then declined in performance; at other times,
the person started out slow, answering few questions correctly at first,
and then finished with a bang, answering most of the final items.
Who was perceived as most intelligent? As one might expect based
on what we know about the primacy effect, the individual who started
out “hot” was seen as more intelligent than the “late bloomer,” despite
the fact that both answered the same number of questions correctly.
In many situations we are not simply observing those we are judg-
ing; we are interacting and actively influencing them, and we have
specific goals that shape our interpretations of the people with whom
we interact. For example, teachers often judge the intelligence of their
students, but they have a hand in teaching and influencing those per-
formances upon which they will base their judgments.Thus, an inter-
esting exception to the primacy effect was discovered in an
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experiment by Joshua Aronson and Edward Jones. In this study sub-
jects tutored performers who were trying to solve a set of anagrams.
Half the subjects were promised a reward if they could raise their stu-
dent’s score; the remaining subjects were promised a reward for im-
proving their students’ enduring ability to solve anagrams, so that they
would do better on anagram tasks in the future. During the tutoring
session the students’ performances—which were prearranged by the
experimenter—followed the pattern of the Jones experiment cited
above: That is, half of the students performed extremely well to start
and then their performance declined; others started slow and then
improved. The sum total was identical—only the order differed.
Those subjects who were motivated to maximize the performance
of their students rated them as more intelligent when their early per-
formance was good. This is the primacy effect: They wanted to help
their students to do well and, after the first few trials, concluded that
their students were intelligent—regardless of their later performance.
But those subjects who were motivated to improve the ability of their
students to solve anagrams rated as more intelligent those who started
poorly but ended up doing well. In other words, they were more im-
pressed with increases in performance than with a fast start. This sug-
gests that if teachers are invested in the long-term development of
their students (rather than how well they will do on the next test) they
will resist making a snap judgment based on a first impression.