Raj Persaud is a psychiatrist and author of The Mental Vaccine for COVID-19.
When supergroup ABBA won the Eurovision song contest in 1974 with their hit single Waterloo, their breakthrough massive sensation that set them on the road to future superstardom, they were 8th in the order out of 16 contestants. Did it help them to be early in the order, to assist with winning, or was it irrelevant?
Would the history of Pop Music have been different, if they had gone first or last in the contest?
Would what psychologists refer to as an ‘order effect’, be so powerful, even as to negate the actual musical impact of the song?
When you go for a job interview, if on the day the panel are interviewing a group of candidates, you are offered the option, should you volunteer to be first, or early in the order, or should you, instead opt for going late, perhaps even try to be the last candidate the board sees, so that you maximise your chances of getting the job over the competition?
Even if you aren’t directly offered the opportunity, you could still claim that you are busy with something urgent that morning, so could you be slotted in last, or even vice versa, you have a pressing engagement coming up in the afternoon, so would the interview panel see you first please?
Maybe your rivals aren’t as aware of the power of the psychology of order effects and don’t object to you monkeying around with the sequence?
You might reason in terms of an ‘order effect’ that going first has a distinct advantage. The panel is still fresh and upbeat and keen on their job of finding the best candidate. Perhaps that initial enthusiasm rubs off, then, on the way they perceive you.
You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to calculate that by the time they are bored to tears with always the same boring answers, by the end of the day, they will find you as the very last candidate, now standing between them and home, a much more irritating and uninteresting prospect, partly because they have become worn down and exhausted by the process.
In which case, according to this perspective, going last, or towards the end would carry significant disadvantages.
Then again, you might reason that being last is best, because when the panel retire to discuss you all, the preceding person will be the one most easily recalled to mind, and therefore will stand out more in the panel’s conscious awareness, therefore may be more likely to appear prominent in their cognizance, whilst they may largely have forgotten the first candidate seen many hours ago.
There is a well-known psychological effect which is just because they remember you, assuming you haven’t been too terrible, they may choose you just for that reason.
But either way, this is lay person theorising, it’s not based on anything other than an amateur analysis of the problem of order effects. For example, maybe the actual scientific research on this finds that order effects don’t have any real consequence. Maybe if you are really good or absolutely terrible, the panel will pick that up wherever in the order you are, so there is no point obsessing about it.
We experience the problem of order effects not just for job interviews, but auditions, queuing up to request leave of absences, speed dating etc etc, it’s basically everywhere. Go first, or go last? Or go home?
In speed dating there is someone in the room you really fancy, then you should station yourself as seeing them first, or last?
As we are about to experience another Eurovision Song Contest hosted in Basel Switzerland, with 180 million viewers across the world, it might be sobering to know that this contest, according to some academic psychologists, may have provided the necessary data to help resolve the order effect controversy.
According to some scientific researchers the Eurovision Song Contest provides a wealth of data for analysing possible psychological distortions arising from the emotional biases in the evaluation of performance.
So, it is possible to use data going back years of Eurovision Song Contests to test theories about whether you should go first, or go in the middle, or venture last, if faced with an order, like a queue of applicants, sitting outside a job interview panel.
Analysing the performance of Eurovision song contestants can reveal the answer to this very important question, some academic psychologists contend.
In any situation where someone has to judge you against other people, and there is an order of who goes first, then you can use the information derived from this academic research to maximise your chances of success in a competitive world.
The other fascinating prospect for analysing this data is that it is possible to compare whether so-called ‘order effects’ play out differently between so-called expert judges, like, let’s say the experts judging the scoring for an Olympic figure skating contest, as opposed to the lay public.
‘Professional’ judges should be expected to be more impartial than televoters. The televised Eurovision Song Contest provides an enormous amount of data allowing researchers to test the impact of various factors on professional jury’s and TV viewers’ judgments separately.
Some national finals of the Eurovision Song Contest are judged by a jury of experts, while others are decided by televoting.
Researchers have examined various classical and pop music competitions, as well as the Eurovision Song Contest, and generally speaking across on average all situations, including expert juries as well as the lay public as judges, contestants who perform later in the sequence, generally receive higher scores.
This is known as the ‘the last shall be first’ effect.
One theory as to why this is was first put forward by one of the winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics Amos Twersky.
He called his theory, contrast theory, according to which, when we focus on a particular performance (being a job interview of a music competition), the performance most in your mind at that moment is naturally compared with what came before, but because the good qualities of the current performer are particularly salient or prominent in your mind at that moment, there is a natural human tendency to rate that experience as better than a past experience, even if they are very similar or the same.
Obviously if a past performance was outstanding, and the current one you are viewing is mediocre, then the hopeless act has little chance even in a contrast predicament to out-perform in your memory the great previous performance.
This contrast theory only works as a real effect if basically all the participants were roughly as good as each other, which is highly likely to be the case in prestigious contests which usually attract high-level performers, all of whom will tend to boast more uniquely positive features than unique negative ones.
In other words, if everyone is roughly as good in a series of job interviews, or music competition, then there is a distinct advantage in attracting better judge’s scores in being a later performer, rather than appearing early on in the contest.
The power of this point is that now we can see from psychological research into this ‘order effect’, it’s the order you come into the contest to perform, that is determining who wins and who loses, rather than the precise actual quality of the individual performance.
Another theory is that as the contest wears on and you experience different performances, it is only natural that you begin to develop a kind of internal measurement scale, on which you start to mentally score performances.
At the beginning of any contest, or sequence, you don’t have much of an internal calibration developed yet. But as the contest wears on, this internal scale becomes more developed, as you see performance after performance, and can get a sense of the variability in standard.
So, then you are kind of slotting each contestant into a personal, maybe even an unconscious comparison scale.
You are thinking, ‘yes that was quite good but not as good as number 2 … but maybe better than number 4….’. The point being here as you get more attuned to the scale, judgements start to get more extreme. In other words, a good performance is rated as being much better than it would otherwise be rated if it comes later in the sequence than if it was earlier.
According to this theory, the exact same standard of performance, if good, is going to seem psychologically better than it really is, if it’s later in the sequence because it’s now going to seem to ‘stand out’ more as being really good.
But this theory also applies to bad performances, which according to this theory will achieve worse scores if they come later in a sequence compared to earlier.
Again, and again, the research finds that contestants who perform in the later serial positions (particularly last position), have the largest advantage with respect to positive evaluations, implying a strong recency effect.
Another question is supposed you already know there is a star candidate who stands head and shoulders above the rest of the competition, should you try to be as far away as possible in the sequence from them, in order to minimise the potential disadvantage of a contrast comparison with an outstanding contender? Might you appear much worse than you really are if you come just after or just before someone really rather excellent?
In fact, research analysing data at Olympic sports where judges scores are relevant finds that the score of an athlete increases with increasing scores of his or her immediate predecessor and decreases with decreasing scores of his or her predecessor. This is referred to as an assimilation rather than contrast effect.
So then, the ideal place in the queue for a job interview or for speed dating someone you fancy? Find the best candidate, make them go second to last, then you go last.
This strategy maximises your chances according to the latest scientific psychology research.
Ok, so what about ABBA then? They didn’t sing last, but they came first, and no one on the original list of competitor performers, anyone can even remember?
Well, if you turn up to a competition and find you are up against ABBA, or the equivalent, turn around and go home, because no order effect is going to save you … from your own … personal … Waterloo.
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