Primacy effect: characteristics, examples and how it influences us

Primacy effect: does this concept sound familiar to you? It is a phenomenon that has to do with perception, memory and attention. Through perception, our brain receives and processes information from the environment through the senses to form a certain impression.

Attention allows us to attend to these stimuli and memory to store them. The primacy effect combines these two capacities, and has to do with the fact that remember more and better the information we perceive at the beginning; for example, in a list of words.

In this article we tell you what this phenomenon consists of and why it occurs and, in addition, we mention some examples so that it is better understood. Finally, we talk about what impact it can have on us, as well as on advertising and marketing.

Primacy effect: what does it consist of?

The primacy effect is a phenomenon typical of basic and cognitive psychology. This is a cognitive bias that involves remember more and better that information that has been presented (and therefore, perceived) first, with a tendency to forget information perceived later.

An example of the primacy effect is the following: imagine that they read you a long list of words, and then they ask you which words you remember. Thanks to this effect, you are likely to remember the first words on the list much better (and also the last ones; in this case, we are talking about another phenomenon, the recency effect).

Why does it occur? Long term memory

The primacy effect is believed to occur because the items or initial information It is best stored in our long-term memory (LTM) than the following elements. However, and relatedly, this phenomenon is weakened in lists of words or items or in information presented quickly, since in this case we have less time to store it in the MLP.

Besides, Presenting items at the beginning increases the probability that those items will be repeated more times than the othersand this makes the “transfer” of information from short-term memory (STM) to the LTM more likely.

A related phenomenon: the primacy of the result

As a curious fact, researchers believe that the primacy effect also It appears when we learn to decide based on past experiences. Thus, the first thing we have learned (and the first rewards received) would condition our future decisions to a greater extent than subsequent learning.

In this case, we are talking about a more specific phenomenon: the primacy of the result. In other words: the first results we obtain in certain tasks, or when performing certain actions, They condition us when it comes to performing the act again in the future.to a greater or lesser extent.

Example of the primacy effect

In 1946, Solomon Asch, an American psychologist recognized for his contributions to social psychology, conducted a study where he verified the primacy effect. Participants in the study listened to a list of adjectives that described a person. What happened was this: when participants were told about someone who was “envious, stubborn, hard-working, and intelligent,” most formed a bad impression of the person.

However, if they heard those same words in a different order, where the positive adjectives (hardworking and intelligent) were placed at the beginning, they had a better impression of the person being described to them. This may have to do with our way of making descriptions, in which we usually include the most important things at the beginning, and then go to the details.

How it influences us

How does the primacy effect influence us? We have seen, through the example with positive and negative adjectives, that this phenomenon can influence us when judging people. And we can also link this to first impressions, for example, which have an impact on the image we form of others.

Marketing and publicity

On the other hand, in the field of marketing and advertising, the primacy effect also has a lot of influence. Advertisers are aware of the phenomenon and try to put the most relevant messages at the beginning of their creations.. They know that the most important places to motivate the sale they intend are the beginning and the end of the time they have.

For example, advertisements that begin just as a highly rated program ends (or after the bells, where the audience is maximum), are better served than those placed in intermediate or later locations. This is one of the reasons why advertising spaces follow New Year’s campaigns.

The primacy effect has to do with basic cognitive processes, such as perception, and with cognitive abilities such as attention and human memory. Now that you know this effect, which appears in most people, you can know where to place the part or type of message that interests you so that it is better remembered by your audience.

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