[HN Gopher] The later we meet someone in a sequence, the more ne...
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The later we meet someone in a sequence, the more negatively we
describe them
Author : amichail
Score : 89 points
Date : 2024-03-11 19:05 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (suchscience.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (suchscience.org)
| barbatoast wrote:
| This is why I prefer to do class presentations first
| hawski wrote:
| In my experience it is fatigue first and failure of the teacher
| to keep the time limit second.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| hmmm, I used to like to go 2nd back then. The first one might
| have (mostly) "technical difficulties" that get solved
| afterwards.
|
| The latter you go, the more desperate the group will become.
| Fatigue and whatnot.
| dividefuel wrote:
| Agreed, I like to go in the first ~20% but not actually
| first. That gives you a chance to quickly make any changes
| from good qualities you noticed in the first ones, but get it
| done before fatigue sets in. And it's just nice to have it
| out of the way so you don't have to stress!
| jollyllama wrote:
| Strange, because I have met people who always like the last
| person they spoke to best.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I think it depends a lot on priming, IQ, memory capacity,
| ability to notice details, etc.
|
| Donald Trump tends to like the last person he spoke to best,
| but probably because that's the person who comes to mind when
| asked, and anyway he doesn't really care one way or the other.
|
| Unless the topic of conversation was himself: Donald Trump, in
| which case he cares a lot, will remember details, and will like
| whichever person said the nicest things about him, regardless
| of sequencing.
| mathgradthrow wrote:
| Maybe they weren't speaking to bachelor contestants.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Could be worth mixing this with memory. This study had people
| rating as they went. If they rated after seeing everyone perhaps
| the ones later would be less negative?
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Recency Bias
|
| This seems to be the opposite of "recency bias", which is
| interesting - if true.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recency_bias
| arduanika wrote:
| Sure, but I learned about this after primacy bias, and now both
| effects seem very salient to me. I forget if there were others
| in between.
| datavirtue wrote:
| My guess is: familiarity. The first person is part of the
| algorithm that is applied to all the others, making them more
| familiar. Familiarity trumps.
| patcon wrote:
| Put another way, we have a tendency to like ppl, but once we
| calibrate, we start penalizing ppl. But without context, we round
| up. We seek positive attributes first before resorting to
| negative, and only in aggregate. It's a local-first favouring
| tactic. local networks (maybe small-world) are maybe more
| stabilized by the up-rounding.
|
| Or maybe it's also more about calibration over time.
|
| Most of our social technology is about not being shitty to one
| another at scale (or maybe "in massive sequence"), so this seems
| aligned with my understanding of the world. The work of progress
| is to "not be shitty" at increasing scale (of population, idea
| complexity, levels of abstraction), and we build institutions
| that mostly try to do that. Though I think digital has kinda
| failed on that mission lately, which is another conversation
|
| Seems kinda nice and adaptive and optimistic even. Though yes,
| downsides in a society that lives at scale, if not mitigated by
| process or social/digital tech.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Put another way, we have a tendency to like ppl, but once we
| calibrate, we start penalizing ppl. But without context, we
| round up._
|
| Put it another way: we're shallow, primitive, creatures.
| sctb wrote:
| If that's true then I would put even less stock into these
| just-so stories.
| petsfed wrote:
| It seems like maybe abstraction runs contrary to the concept of
| not being shitty, because while abstraction is meant to
| neutrally essentialize people, as often as not, the abstraction
| process is used to identify aberrations for individual
| treatment, rather than to streamline creating individual
| treatments for all.
|
| Put another way, we typically tend to sort first for assholes,
| then maybe sort for other things later.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| Unrelated but sort of not. If you can don't ever do a job
| interview after lunch on a Friday. It will never go well. No one
| wants to be there and is thinking about the weekend.
| yumraj wrote:
| Hmm...
|
| I would think that there are two forces at play here:
|
| 1) the ones who come first are not compared against any of the
| latter ones, so make a better impression
|
| 2) the ones who come last are still in memory, especially if
| results are all tabulated in the end.
|
| So, if the above is true, and there is no guarantee that it is, I
| would have expected an inverted bell curve.
| abeppu wrote:
| I think a flip side I've seen is when the first applicant through
| an interview loop has basically no chance of getting an offer
| because (a) people know they're not calibrated and (b) "surely
| the odds are low that the very first person would be the right
| person"
|
| This kinda means it's a waste of the candidate's time unless
| they're _also_ just interviewing for practice.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Multiple times I've been the first candidate in an interview
| loop (out of say 3 or 4 candidates) and gotten picked.
| eastbound wrote:
| Yes, it works as long as it's a batch. Won't work if the next
| candidate they see is 15 days later.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| It really depends. A lot of teams don't want to waste their
| time reviewing a bunch of candidates and will pick the first
| person who impresses them. Not saying they won't go through
| with whatever other interviews they had scheduled, but if the
| first person knocks it out of the park and the remaining 3
| candidates who make it through the interview cycle that week
| are less impressive, they'll just make an offer to the first
| person rather than continue interviewing
| axus wrote:
| Reminds me of the old trope, "We wouldn't want to hire someone
| with bad luck."
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I just accepted an offer last week. I was told I was the first
| to interview and they cancelled the others because I was a
| perfect fit. Interviewed Friday morning, offer came Friday
| afternoon, I accepted that evening. /anecdata
| mxkopy wrote:
| I wonder if this is more due to the pressure to be descriptive
| than because of any sort of internal dialogue. If I'm being asked
| to do a study I feel that I need to contribute by adding
| something 'new' and 'substantive' for each question (which
| ultimately leads to choosing negative qualities to describe a
| person), but if I weren't expected to have an answer I would've
| had more boring thoughts about the questions.
| airstrike wrote:
| At Kellogg they used to say it's best to either be the first to
| be interviewed or the last--assuming you're a decent candidate
| and well prepared to begin with.
|
| First because you set the benchmark, and your outstanding
| qualities become "requirements" for the candidates that follow to
| meet that benchmark.
|
| Last because of recency bias, so whatever qualities you have are
| better recalled by interviewers.
|
| Everyone else becomes somewhat forgettable.
|
| (I would guess they mentioned a study about it, but it's been 10
| years and I don't have the reference handy.)
|
| In my experience as an interviewer, everyone in the middle does
| get somewhat mixed up together, especially when I had less than 5
| minutes to scribble notes and reset between candidates.
|
| But I would modify "first" and "last" to "towards the start" and
| "towards the end" e.g., I will (subconsciously) more easily
| benchmark candidates against a very strong "second interview of
| the day" than against a lackluster "very first candidate", if
| that makes sense.
|
| Said differently, whoever is the first candidate that hits it out
| of the park becomes the benchmark. And whoever happens to be the
| best relatively strong candidate is more easily recalled than
| other relatively strong candidates.
|
| Thank you for coming to my TED talk
| cyanydeez wrote:
| now to make it interesting, place the middle candidates right
| after lunch to see if having lunch improves the middle stretch
| bschne wrote:
| (how) do you (try to) correct for this with interviews?
| babyshake wrote:
| [delayed]
| samatman wrote:
| I question describing this as a cognitive bias, let alone an
| unconscious one, and the experimental protocol used here is awful
| for attempting to show that it is.
|
| The examples they give: Job interviews, dating, auditions, are
| all cases of search for the best out of a set of possibilities.
| The earliest candidates have the _initial_ advantage of there
| being few in the set, or none, for the first candidate. Since the
| purpose is to compare the entire set, by definition, the first
| one is the best you 've seen. Even if they objectively aren't
| great, the rating _at that time_ will tend to be more positive.
| That isn 't a bias, it's a best-effort judgement in the face of
| incomplete information. You'd need a crystal ball not to do this.
|
| What they're measuring is immediate impressions, while what they
| should be measuring is _decisions_ made after the search
| concludes. I 've certainly had the experience of interviewing a
| candidate for a job and telling myself "yeah, might be ok", then
| a later candidate comes by and I adjust that to "no, this one is
| much better". If they want to show that being first or early in
| such a sequence makes it more likely someone will get picked,
| they've failed to do so with this protocol.
| thereticent wrote:
| I can't tell from the linked article whether the
| ratings/descriptions were made immediately, but if so you are
| correct. It's just not applicable to those examples. This only
| applies in a "hired on the spot" type of evaluation.
|
| I'm a psychologist, and though HN usually tends to be tough on
| psychology as a science, I'm amazed that this paper is being
| discussed so earnestly. Social science in particular should
| require a bit more skepticism.
| mathgradthrow wrote:
| Alternate explanation. The more bachelor contestants you watch,
| the more patterns of shitty behavior you identify. One could
| conceive of a more representative population than influencers
| trying to make money on the bachelor.
| tqi wrote:
| > The participants described the first few individuals quite
| positively, using an average of 6.2 positive words each. But as
| they progressed through the sequence, their descriptions became
| significantly more negative, dipping to an average of just 4.7
| positive words by the 20th person.
|
| I don't have access to the study, but I'd be curious why they
| chose to count positive words as opposed to just asking people to
| rate on a numerical scale? My impression is that sentiment
| scoring via bag-of-words is not a particularly robust method,
| especially in 2024. It also sounds like they didn't normalize by
| description length, so outcome could just as easily be because
| people's responses got shorter as time went on due to fatigue?
|
| (also, this is a nit with the article rather than the study, but
| given the methodology I think it is important to distinguish
| between becoming less positive and becoming more negative, and in
| this case I would not describe using fewer positive words as
| "became significantly more negative")
| balderdash wrote:
| Yeah - antidotally I feel like earlier in a hiring process
| people are apt to expound on candidates fit for portions of the
| role and in later stages it basically just thumbs up or down
| and only more exposition in the case of disagreement
| CRConrad wrote:
| What do you need an antidote against? ("Anecdotally", I
| think.)
| hinkley wrote:
| Maybe this is why some companies have hierarchical hiring
| processes.
|
| The first round is a basic filter. By the time you get to
| the final round you're only thinking about a dozen people.
| p1necone wrote:
| Yeah, when you don't have anything to compare them with you
| need to describe them. But once you have some strong
| candidates to compare them with everyone just becomes "are
| they better or worse than X".
| ethanwillis wrote:
| Likert scales have their own problems.
| xyzelement wrote:
| A related concept I noticed is that we are "wired" to identify
| with whoever is presented as the protagonist, even when the
| information is readily available to recognize them as the
| antagonist.
|
| EG - I recently watched Peter Pan for the first time, as an
| adult. Peter is basically a horrible person who deludes and
| kidnaps children, puts them in incredibly dangerous situations,
| doesn't care about people other than to make himself look good
| (eg, he fought the pirates who had kidnapped the Indian princess,
| then he got so distracted w himself she nearly drowned in the
| tide). On the other hand, we're told that Hook and the pirates
| are the bad guys but really Hook is just responding to the fact
| that Peter had maimed him and fed his hand to a crocodile.
| There's no indication of anything bad Hook has done prior or
| since, other than trying to "get" Peter for having done that.
|
| The protagonist of Peter Pan is actually the dad who was trying
| to protect the kids from nonsense but even he got derailed by the
| wife, therefore leaving the kids vulnerable to all that has
| happened to them.
|
| But if you ask most people who are familiar with the story,
| they'll react to the superficial presentation that Pan is
| whimsical and aspirational for children while the Dad represents
| the dull adult world to be escaped from, or something like that.
|
| The crux is that the narrative form suggests how we should feel
| about whom even if that makes no sense. I think this is what the
| article here is talking about as well in a different
| manifestation.
| bbarnett wrote:
| While I get what you're saying, context counts.
|
| Hook is a pirate.
|
| By definition, that's a murdering, raping thief, whos main
| income is boarding honest ships, slaughtering their crew, etc.
|
| Piracy is/was punishable by death.
|
| The story is old, but at the time written, anyone would be a
| hero for maiming, or killing a pirate.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| Pedantic comment perhaps, but "protagonist" does not mean "good
| guy" or "admirable". It just means main character in a story.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Cmon. Hook is a pirate trying to kill a child.
| greatgib wrote:
| Imagine the huge impact this has on the fairness of jugement in
| trials?
|
| Especially in current time where justice is understaffed and
| judges have to work long hours...
|
| This is quite scary in my opinion.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I'll hold my breath until I see this result replicated a few
| times using different methods.
|
| This reminds me a lot of https://datacolada.org/98 and if I think
| about it, the data would be trivial to fake.
| cushpush wrote:
| First Come First Served?
| sciencesama wrote:
| Familiarity brings fondness !!
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > To test this, the researchers conducted a number of studies. In
| one, they had 992 participants (recruited from Prolific Academic)
| describe 20 people based on their Facebook profile pictures.
|
| Alternative interpretation:
|
| Paid participants who most likely just want to do the study and
| get paid get more and more cranky the more pointless words they
| have to write about unknown people's Facebook profiles.
|
| How well this actually reflects phenomenon in the real world is
| actually unknown.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > You're just as qualified and just as talented as those who went
| before you.
|
| there is no such thing as people with identical profiles
| quotemstr wrote:
| This is exactly the sort of popular-psychology thing that fails
| to replicate, isn't it? I'm pattern-matching it against "ego
| depletion" and the hungry-judge theory, both of which failed to
| replicate.
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