First Is Best in Rapid Social Judgment and Consumer Decision

Because the world unfolds serially, events are intrinsically experienced sequentially rather than simultaneously. We report six experiments designed to test the effect of first position on preference and choice using items that ranged from consumer goods in lab and field experiments to animals, humans, or groups. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated preference for firsts in rapid consumer choice. Experiments 3 and 4 established the generality of the effect and used a response latency measure of preference to learn about its automatic component. Experiments 5 and 6 showed that first is preferred in decisions of social import such as the release of a criminal on parole. Together, these six experiments demonstrate a "first is best" effect and we offer possible interpretations based on evolutionary and learning mechanisms of this "bound" on rational behavior.