Management of Organizations, University of California, Berkeley, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2012;7(6):e35088. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0035088. Epub 2012 Jun 27.
We experience the world serially rather than simultaneously. A century of research on human and nonhuman animals has suggested that the first experience in a series of two or more is cognitively privileged. We report three experiments designed to test the effect of first position on implicit preference and choice using targets that range from individual humans and social groups to consumer goods. Experiment 1 demonstrated an implicit preference to buy goods from the first salesperson encountered and to join teams encountered first, even when the difference in encounter is mere seconds. In Experiment 2 the first of two consumer items presented in quick succession was more likely to be chosen. In Experiment 3 an alternative hypothesis that first position merely accentuates the valence of options was ruled out by demonstrating that first position enhances preference for the first even when it is evaluatively negative in meaning (a criminal). Together, these experiments demonstrate a "first is best" effect and we offer possible interpretations based on evolutionary mechanisms of this "bound" on rational behavior and suggest that automaticity of judgment may be a helpful principle in clarifying previous inconsistencies in the empirical record on the effects of order on preference and choice.
我们是按顺序而不是同时体验世界的。一个多世纪以来，人类和非人类动物的研究表明，在两个或更多的系列中，第一个体验在认知上是有优势的。我们报告了三项旨在使用从个人到社会团体再到消费品的目标来测试第一位置对隐性偏好和选择影响的实验。实验 1 表明，人们更倾向于购买第一个遇到的销售人员的商品，并加入第一个遇到的团队，即使两者的相遇时间只有几秒钟。在实验 2 中，在快速连续呈现的两个消费品中，第一个更有可能被选中。在实验 3 中，通过证明即使第一个选项在评价上是负面的（如罪犯），它也能增强对第一个选项的偏好，排除了第一个位置仅仅强调选项的效价的假设。总的来说，这些实验证明了“先到先得”的效果，我们根据这种“束缚”对理性行为的进化机制提出了可能的解释，并建议判断的自动性可能是澄清先前关于顺序对偏好和选择影响的经验记录中的不一致的有用原则。
