Psychology behind the Primacy Effect

Hey dear community, first of all I would like to welcome you to my contribution and hope you had a pleasant day! Today I would like to go into an interesting psychological topic and hope you can learn new things.

The primacy effect also describes the interesting phenomenon that people already have an opinion after the first impression without being able to judge correctly and this fleeting action also influences the future actions of the person. Even if it comes to the exchange of information in the later course, the first impression remains strongest and it often takes only a few seconds and people have already made a picture of the person and it can also be said that it is a kind of self-deception and the perception of the individual is disturbed by it and people are usually permanently surrounded by this effect in everyday life and judge according to the first impression. The primacy effect has been researched for a long time and can be seen in various areas such as marketing where the seller or advertiser specifically pays attention to the fact that people are so enthusiastic about a product after the first impression that they usually tend to buy and by applying this effect in the marketing area, the sales figures are increased and the customer is more bound to a certain product or brand. Even in areas in which public opinion is shaped, you can see how this effect is used to bind people to a certain narrative and of course the one who can convince a wide audience with a certain opinion has a huge advantage over those who only share their opinion later and in the later course these moments are often repeated to bind people even more to this impression, which often results in people not wanting to admit a different opinion and being dazzled by the primacy effect. From a psychological point of view, the long-term memory and subconscious are specifically targeted here and the opposite of this effect is also called the recency effect, which also describes the phenomenon that the last impression remains particularly anchored in memory and if both effects are combined, one also speaks of the Serial position effect , which is fundamentally important for the understandable human discernment.

Many thanks for stopping by and I hope you could learn something new about psychology! I captured these pictures with my Camera Sony Alpha 6000 plus 55-210 mm lens.