Center-of-inattention: Position biases in decision-making☆
Section snippets
Literature review
Prior research on people perception has not only shown inconclusive results but has also not disentangled why these effects occur when they do (e.g., McArthur, 1981, Taylor and Fiske, 1975). There are a number of possible reasons why a position effect on people perception (favoring the center) may exist, if it does. These are grouped under “salience effects,” “attributional effects,” and “social norms” and are described below in the context of a task where the goal is to identify the best
The center-of-inattention hypothesis
We revisit the issue of attention as a potential antecedent of position effects and suggest that differential levels of attention paid to players’ errors in different positions affects their likelihood of being retained. The key issue of importance is that in certain tasks (such as promotions, retention, and hiring) observers or participants must attend to the errors of players (rather than just aspects of their good performance) to make decisions regarding which person to retain and which
Study 1: Stylized choice experiments: The “center-stage” schema
The purpose of these stylized choice experiments was to examine people’s lay beliefs regarding the advantage of certain positions in different situations. Participants were undergraduates at two west-coast universities, University of California at Berkeley, and San Francisco State University, who undertook the study for partial course credit (n = 188). All participants were told to imagine a scenario and then make a choice regarding which position they would occupy or which position they believed
Study 2: Weak links in human performance perceptions
This study examines biases in voting behavior in a TV game show where players are assigned at random to different starting positions. The use of the television game serves as a natural laboratory to examine tenets of rational decision theory, which has strong precedents in the analysis of economic behavior with games such as Jeopardy! (Metrick, 1995), The Price is Right (Bennett and Hickman, 1993, Berk et al., 1996), Card Sharks (Gertner, 1993), and Let’s Make a Deal, which was hosted by Monty
Procedure
Experimental participants were undergraduates at the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley who undertook the study during a class on experimental design (n = 22). We used a one way 2 level between subjects design manipulating attention (low/high). Participants observed selected segments of an episode of The Weakest Link.6 After watching the introductions of the players, all participants saw round 1 of the game. At this stage, we introduced a
Study 4: Give me the money
This study replicates the game The Weakest Link in the lab and collects process measures of recall of performance of players to directly test the assertion that position effects are due to biased recall of the performance of players in different positions when one is actually playing the game.
Study participants
Study participants were 111 students enrolled in an introductory marketing class at San Francisco State University who completed the study for partial course credit.
Procedure
We used an interview paradigm. Study participants were told “You are a manager that has just opened a sales office in Hong Kong. You are now looking to hire a business student to work in your Hong Kong sales office as an intern during the summer semester. You have posted an announcement at HKUST for the job. Five students applied
Procedure
Experimental participants were undergraduates at U.C. Berkeley who undertook the study for partial course credit (n = 81). The design was a 2 (end-game rule: cooperative/competitive) between subjects design. Participants observed selected segments of an episode of The Weakest Link.
General discussion
In this paper, we proposed that there exists a location advantage of being in the central positions in a group and that such an advantage is caused by limited attention to performance inaccuracies of the player in that position. We tested these propositions with different studies using different methods and measures. Based on prior research that argued that position effects were either due to attention with central positions being more vivid (Taylor & Fiske, 1975), or attribution or social
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We appreciate the assistance of NBC studios for making available the taped episodes used to code the data in Study 2. We appreciate the help of Barbara Mellers for helping analyze data for Study 2, the assistance of Judi Strebel for conducting Study 1, Marie-Claire Meissels for conducting Study 3, and Catherine Wong for preparing the stimuli for Study 5. The order of authorship is alphabetical and reflects equal contribution.
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