Study: To Get Top Scores, Go Last?

March 2, 2005 — -- Here's the scene: You've waited for your big day, and you finally take the stage to belt out that song that's going to put you in the chips, depending on how much the judges like your performance. Will you have a better chance of beating out your competitors if you're first or if you're last?

The edge nearly always goes to competitors who are later in the order of appearance, not earlier, according to some intriguing new research.

Psychologist Wändi Bruine De Bruin of Carnegie Mellon University has studied various competitive events and found that judges tend to give higher scores to those who appeared later in the program than those who appeared earlier.

"I have found that the later you perform, the better your scores and the higher your chances of winning," she says.

Bruine De Bruin, who is from Holland, recently earned her doctorate in the relatively new field of "decision science." She says it is a cross between psychology and economics, and is designed to study how people make decisions, and whether those decisions are the right ones. She is now a research associate in an interdisciplinary program at Carnegie Mellon that emphasizes the roles of various disciplines in how we make decisions and analyze risks.

So she's not obsessed with such things as figure skating and singing competitions, but she's very interested in how the order of appearance affects the judging. We are all victims of something called the "serial position effect," which isn't as deadly as it sounds, but could contribute to your losing a competition or choosing the wrong apartment.

In fact, the idea for the research emerged when Bruine De Bruin was looking for an apartment herself.

It would be nice if we could see all the options available when we are trying to make a decision, she says, but "in the real world it doesn't always work that way. You can't see all the options at the same time."

Even while looking for an apartment, she says, she tended to exaggerate the importance of the good things in the apartments she viewed last as opposed to those she had seen earlier.