The effects of serial position at study on implicit and explicit tests of memory were investigated. Werder, 1972; Postman & Phillips, 1965b; Rundus, 1980).
Every day, people are bombarded with advertisements. When you watch television, there are advertisements for services or products, we drive by billboards with advertisements on them, we see them in stores and in magazines; we even hear them on the radio. Businesses are always seeking new marketing techniques to gain new customers, but the use of the serial position effect to influence consumers buying habits is a method that has been used for years. “Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) originally coined the term ‘serial position effect’ after conducting a number of memory studies on himself, and in 1962, Murdock demonstrated how positioning affects recall with a multi participant experiment” (Mason, 2015).
The serial position effect is when a person is able to recall something that occurred, but only at the beginning and temporarily at the end. If someone read you a group of words and asked you to repeat them, you are highly likely to be able to recall the first few words and the ones at the end, while the ones in the middle would be very difficult to recall. The primacy effect is what causes people to remember the words in the beginning, and this is due to a person rehearsing those words until their short-term memory becomes full and the memory of those words are transferred to long-term memory. The recency effect is what causes a person to remember a few words at the end of a list of words. This occurs because those words are stored into short term memory and in most cases, it will be forgotten in about 30 seconds.
How does the serial position effect help companies sell products? When companies pay for a commercial slot on television network, one important thing that they will seek is to get their commercial shown first during a commercial break or last. Getting their commercial shown first will increase the likelihood of viewers storing the memory of the commercial in LTM and being influenced to purchase the product that they saw based on that memory. While the memories from the recency effect will only be stored in STM, depending on the product being sold, a person may be influenced to purchase the product that was shown before the memory fades away. Imagine being very hungry, and seeing a commercial for a new dish at Pizza Hut. If that is the last commercial that you saw and you are very hungry, you may feel inclined to order that dish while the vivid memory is still in STM.
There was a test that looked at the effect of advertising and positioning commercials to create a desired effect. The study consisted of a group of college students watching some commercials and recalling what each of the commercials were about. After the commercials ended, the college students were able to recall the commercials in the beginning and the end, but they struggled with the details about the commercials in the middle (WS, 2005). Also, the primacy effect continued to be effective long after the study was over while the recency effect ceased to work and those memories were no longer able to be recalled in detail (WS, 2005).
The serial position effect is also important when designing a website and posting important links on that website. If you visit a webpage, you may see a few links throughout the page. A 2006 study showed that website visitors were more likely to click links at the top and bottom of a webpage than they were to click links in the middle of the webpage (Moore, n.d.). For this reason, businesses are encouraged to make sure that their most important links are posted at the top and bottom of their webpages.
The effects of the serial position effect in the world of marketing/advertising has been made clear, and it is good for consumers to be aware of this. The products that we may be influenced to buy because of the serial position effect might not be the best product or have the best prices for that type of product, so consumers should try to focus on what is being shown in the middle sometimes. We all could be missing something beneficial to us or someone else that we didn’t see because we didn’t know that advertisements were being positioned to keep us from remembering other advertisements of a company’s competitors.
WS, T. (2005). Serial position effects in recall of television commercials. – PubMed – NCBI. [online] Ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15871298 [Accessed 15 Oct. 2017].
Mason, J. (2015). Psychology for marketers: serial position effect | Plug and Play. [online] Plug and Play. Available at: https://www.plugandplaydesign.co.uk/engage/psychology-marketers-serial-position-effect/ [Accessed 15 Oct. 2017].
Moore, S. (2017). The Serial Position Effect in Advertising. [online] Smallbusiness.chron.com. Available at: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/serial-position-effect-advertising-34036.html [Accessed 15 Oct. 2017].