There Is No Primacy Effect in Interpersonal Perception: A Series of Preregistered Analyses Using Judgments of Actual Behavior
Bibliographic record
Abstract
First impressions are commonly assumed to be particularly important: Information about a person that we obtain early on may shape our overall impression of that person more strongly than information obtained later. In contrast to previous research, the present series of preregistered analyses uses actual person judgment data to investigate this so-called primacy effect: Perceivers ( N = 1,395) judged the videotaped behavior of target persons ( N = 200) in 10 different situations. Separate subsamples of about 200 perceivers each were used in moving from exploratory to increasingly confirmatory analyses. Contrary to our expectations, no primacy effect was found. Instead, judgments of the targets in later situations were more strongly associated with overall impressions, indicating an acquaintance effect. Relying on early information seems unreasonable when more comprehensive information is readily available. Early information may, however, affect perceivers’ behavioral reactions to the targets and thus their future interactions, if such interactions are possible.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".