Now listen to part of a lecture on this topic in a psychology class.
Here's an example from my own life. Before I started teaching, I worked as a research assistant in a laboratory for a year. Well, during my very first week on the job, I made a suggestion to my boss on how we could improve the way we were running an experiment. My suggestion was a good one. The experiment was successful and we got great results.
Anyway, that first week, because of that one experiment, my boss decided, perhaps without even realizing it, he decided I was a great research assistant and he never changed his mind. After that first week, I was…I was okay, you know, average. I was a good worker, but I also made mistakes. Everyone does. But whenever my boss introduced me to someone, he'd say, this is John, our star research assistant.
But a coworker of mine, she wasn't as fortunate, her first week at the lab, she made a big mistake and the lab lost some important data. We recovered the data, but it cost of the lab time and money. Well, our boss concluded that week that my coworker was unreliable. Incompetent. And he continued to think that. But, actually, after that week, she turned out to be a good research assistant, probably better than me. She made some other small mistakes, like I said, everyone does. But our boss thought of her as unreliable cuz he only noticed her mistakes.
Using the two examples from the professor’s lecture, explain what is meant by “the primacy effect” and how it can affect our opinions.
In the lecture, the professor mainly talked about the theory that how primacy effect be used in real life. To reinforce the theory, the professor gave two examples in his speech. The first one is that during his first week as a laboratory assistant, he made a good suggestion to his boss and it worked pretty well. And after that, his boss regarded him as a star employee even though he made some mistakes from time to time. The other one is that his colleague made a big mistake and lost some important data, and it cost the lab some time and money to fix it. So after that the boss decided that she was unreliable and incompetent. But actually she was really good at her job maybe even better than the professor himself. However, their boss could only noticed her mistake based on the performance of her very first week. And that's the two examples the speaker presented to explain his idea.
