Order effects abound whenever we are judged as part of a sequence when others perform before and after us. The question is: where in the order should you perform?
Data from the Eurovision Song Contest and other music competitions shows there are significant order effects.When supergroup ABBA won in 1974 with their hit single"Waterloo," their breakthrough massive sensation that set them on the road to future superstardom, they were eighth in the order out of 16 contestants.
Did it help them to be early in the order or was it irrelevant? Was it a factor that they came in order of performance, in the middle of the contest?Would what psychologists refer to as an"order effect" been so powerful, even as to negate the actual musical impact of the song?When you go for a job interview and are offered the option, should you volunteer to be first in a series of candidates or early in the order, or should you instead opt for going late, perhaps even try to be the last candidate the board sees, so that you maximise your chances of getting the job over the competition? Even if you aren’t directly offered the opportunity, you could still claim that you are busy with something urgent that morning and ask to be slotted in last, or even vice versa and ask to be first. Maybe your rivals aren’t as aware of the power of the psychology of order effects and don’t object to you monkeying around with the sequence. You might reason in terms of an"order effect" that going first has a distinct advantage. The panel are still fresh and upbeat and keen on their job of finding the best candidate. Perhaps that initial enthusiasm rubs off, then, on the way they perceive you.answers, by the end of the day, they will find you as the very last candidate, now standing between them and home, a much more irritating and uninteresting prospect, partly because they have become worn down and exhausted by the process. In this case, according to this perspective, going last, or towards the end, would carry significant disadvantages. Then again, you might reason that being last is best, because when the panel retire to discuss you all, the preceding person will be the one most easily recalled to mind, and therefore will stand out more in the panel’s conscious awareness, and therefore may be more likely to appear prominent in their cognizance, whilst they may largely have forgotten the first candidate seen many hours ago. There is a well-known psychological effect, which is that just because they remember you, assuming you haven’t been too terrible, they may choose you just for that reason. But either way, this is layperson theorising; it's not based on anything other than an amateur analysis of the problem of order effects. For example, maybe the actual scientific research on this finds that order effects don’t have any real consequence. Maybe if you are really good or absolutely terrible, the panel will pick that up wherever in the order you are, so there is no point obsessing about it. We experience the problem of order effects not just for job interviews, but auditions, queuing up to request leaves of absence, speedIn speed dating, if there is someone in the room you really fancy, then should you station yourself as seeing them first or last? As we are about to experience another Eurovision Song Contest hosted in Basel Switzerland, with 180 million viewers across the world, it might be sobering to know that this contest, according to some academic psychologists, may have provided the necessary data to help resolve the order effect controversy. Researchers have examined various classical and pop music competitions, as well as the Eurovision Song Contest, and generally speaking across all situations, including expert juries as well as the lay public as judges, contestants who perform later in the sequence generally receive higher scores. One theory as to why this is was first put forward by one of the winners of the Nobel Prize for economics, Amos Tversky. He called his theory"contrast theory" and it suggests that when we focus on a particular performance , the performance most in your mind at that moment is naturally compared with what came before, but because the good qualities of the current performer are particularly salient or prominent in your mind at that moment, there is a natural human tendency to rate that experience as better than a past experience, even if they are very similar or the same. Another theory is that as the contest wears on and you experience different performances, it is only natural that you begin to develop a kind of internal measurement scale on which you start to mentally score performances. At the beginning of any contest or sequence, you don’t have much of an internal calibration developed yet. But as the contest wares on, this internal scale becomes more developed, as you see performance after performance and can get a sense of the variability in standard. According to this theory, the exact same standard of performance, if good, is going to seem psychologically better than it really is if it's later in the sequence because it's now going to seem to"stand out" more as being really good. But this theory also applies to bad performances, which according to this theory will achieve worse scores if they come later in a sequence compared to earlier. Again and again, the research finds that contestants who perform in the later serial positions have the largest advantage with respect to positive evaluations, implying a strong recency effect. OK, so what about ABBA then? They didn’t sing last, but they came first, and can anyone even remember anyone else on the original list of competitors? Well, if you turn up to a competition and find you are up against ABBA, or the equivalent, turn around and go home, because no order effect is going to save you… from your own… personal… Waterloo.Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 12, No. 4, July 2017, pp. 415–419 Order effects in the results of song contests: Evidence from the Eurovision and the New Wave Evgeny A. Antipov∗ Elena B. Pokryshevskaya† Haan, M., Dijkstra, S., & Dijkstra, P. . Expert Judgment Versus Public Opinion–Evidence from the Eurovision Song Contest. Journal of Cultural Economics, 29, 59–78. Lionel Page, Katie Page. Last shall be first: A field study of biases in sequential performance evaluation on the Idol series. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2009, 73 , pp.186. ff10.1016/j.jebo.2009.08.012ff. ffhal-00728417is a Consultant Psychiatrist working in private practice in the UK and is the author ofSelf Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
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