IF YOU want to finish first, go last. That’s the advice of researchers who have shown that judges give better marks to contestants who perform at the end of a competition. The finding could also apply to decision-making exercises such as house-hunting, marking exams and job interviews.
Wändi Bruine de Bruin of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, studied the scores awarded to skaters in the world and European figure-skating championships and to singers in the Eurovision Song Contest – the notoriously trashy Europop extravaganza.
Bruine de Bruin found a small increase in scores for contestants who performed later in…
