Order effects in impression formation in four classes of stimuli.

Order of presentation effects were studied in 4 impression-formation tasks. S was read a set of adjectives describing a person, or of foods describing a meal, or of headlines describing a newspaper, or of life events describing a week in his life. He then gave his impression as to how much he would like the object or event so described. For each stimulus class, these impression responses were compared between high-low and low-high orders of presentation. Primacy (1st impression) effects were found with foods and adjectives. For headlines, a somewhat equivocal primacy effect was obtained. For life events, order of presentation effects were negligible in all 3 experiments. It was suggested that the results favored the hypothesis that primacy is produced by decreases in the weight or importance attached to the later items of a set, rather than to shifts in meaning of the later items. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)