All's Eco-Friendly That Ends Eco-Friendly (If Remembered as Such): Memory Processes in Retrospective Judgment of Environmentally Significant Sequences

Retrospective judgments of environmentally significant sequences are biased by recency: sequences ending with an environmentally friendly item are rated as more eco-friendly than otherwise identical sequences with the same item earlier in the list. A corresponding primacy effect is typically absent. This may have applied consequences for how consumers perceive the environmental friendliness of their purchase decisions, for example. The aim of the present investigation was to reach a better understanding of why the recency but not the primacy effect manifests in eco-judgments. We found that the recency effect is just as large when continual distraction takes place between item presentations as when it does not. Moreover, memory for recently presented items was better than that for older items, but a filled retention interval reduced the recency effect in both memory and retrospective judgments. These findings support a memory-based explanation of the recency effect in retrospective judgments and suggest that poor memory of items early in the sequence is the reason why the primacy effect in judgments does not manifest.