The Primacy Effect

"The Primacy Effect" is a thriller, based on a Tom Clancy book, in which Harrison Ford plays a CIA operative who has turned rogue and ... I don't know, beats up some guys. Actually, that's not what it is -- it's a term I made up for something that probably has a proper term somewhere, but I haven't come across it, so that means I get to make up my own term for it. "The primacy effect." Do you like it?

I'll start over. The "primacy effect" is a term I'm using for the tendency for my brain to have a certain thing in mind as the first example of some group. So there's a group, see, and there are things in that group, and my brain, probably arbitrarily, picks one of those things to be the thing that represents that group best -- the thing that has the most "groupiness," after the groupies have the thing ... and the ... group ...

I'll start over again. If you say the word "fruit," the first fruit, in my mind, is an apple. Banana is second. Orange is probably third. After that it gets fuzzy. Grapes rank before kiwis, definitely. But where would peaches compare with pears? Hard to say. I have no idea what criteria are being used to create these rankings in my head. I don't even know why these rankings are necessary.

Maybe it's just a weird quirk of my mind, this tendency to rank things in a group according to how emblematic, I suppose, they are of that group.  In reality, I realize that apples are just as much fruits as bananas are. I don't mean to offend any bananas who are reading this by implying they are somehow less worthy than apples. It's just a ranking that my brain sets up for no apparent reason.

Among pets, dogs are first. Cats are second. I say that even though I don't like dogs at all -- in fact, I have a line ready if my two-year-old ever asks to get a dog: "Sorry honey, we can't get a dog, because daddy will kill it." All apologies to the dog lovers out there -- I'm sure yours is the one dog in the universe that isn't either a kiss-ass or an asshole or both -- but let's put that argument aside for now and concentrate on why my brain would rank dogs first in the "pets" category when cats are, have been, and always will be my favorite kind of pet.

I think it must be culturally programmed. Dogs are still the most common pet in the United States (despite the fact that they are worse in every possible way than every other possible pet, including sharks, tapeworms, and monkeys with liberal philosophies on poop-flinging), so maybe that's enough the make them First Pet in some abstract way.

But what about apples? Are apples really the most popular fruit in the United States? I have no idea. What about all the other things that seem to take first place in my mind? Among colors, blue is first. Red is second. Green is third, even though yellow really should be third, because it's more primary or whatever. (Sidebar: Did you know that in Japan, they traditionally don't make any distinction between green and blue? Much the same way most of us wouldn't make a distinction between yellow-orange and orange-yellow -- they just don't see the difference. It makes you realize that the rainbow isn't a starkly delineated set of rows -- it's a spectrum of gradually changing color tones, and each culture constructs its people's perception of where to draw the lines within that spectrum to differentiate colors.)

Hey, sidebar, shut up! I'm trying to make a point here. (Sidebar: Sorry.) What was I saying ... well, I suppose you get the point. Does anyone else have this primacy effect? If so, do you have different conceptions of what is First Pet or First Color or First Fruit or whatever else? And do you like dogs? If so, I don't want to hear about it.