Serial Order Effect

Psychologists gave it a name because it kept happening. Serial Order Effect is the name; the happening you already know.

This is one of those findings that improves manners. Once you know it, you judge others more gently, because you can see the machinery moving inside yourself first.

Strip it to the floor and you find an old instruction: look carefully, judge slowly, act decently. The new name exists because the old instruction keeps being forgotten.

Watch two shopkeepers in the same lane during a lean month. One cuts quality, the other cuts margin. In a year, one has customers and the other has stock.

Money is a good clerk and a terrible master; the arrangement is entirely up to us. A word is a lamp. This one is now yours to carry.