The Moment of Tenure and the Moment of Truth: When it Pays to be Aware of Recency Effects in Social Judgments

The effect of manipulating the presentation order of diagnostic information in an impression formation task was assessed. Subjects rated six critical stimulus persons for honesty and another six for intelligence. The target person descriptions on critical trials were always internally inconsistent, composed of one higher diagnosticity behavior (intelligent, dishonest) and either one or four lower diagnosticity behaviors from the same trait dimension (stupid, honest). The behaviors were either moderate, extreme or very extreme, but behaviors describing a single target were always at the same level of extremity. For half of the subjects, on the critical trials the higher diagnosticity behaviors were presented first in the serial presentation order; for the other half of the subjects, these highly diagnostic items were presented last. The impression rating data indicated that recency effects occurred: the highly diagnostic behaviors had a greater impact on impressions when those behaviors were presented last. Furthermore, recency increased with behavior extremity, and was particularly strong with descriptions composed of five very extreme behaviors. Recall of the critical high diagnosticity events and impression judgments were not correlated, suggesting that these recency effects were caused by on-line processing mechanisms.