Antonia Mantonakis

Antonia Mantonakis

Consumer researcher and first author of a 2009 Psychological Science paper showing that the order in which options are tasted shapes which one people choose.

Who they are

Mantonakis is the first author, with Rodero, Lesschaeve and Hastie, of "Order in choice" (2009). The study asked participants to taste sets of two, three, four or five wines in sequence and then pick the one they liked best. The first wine had a large advantage, a primacy effect. Participants who knew a lot about wine behaved differently in the longer sequences, with a pull towards the last glass, a recency effect.

The result sits beside the ballot studies as evidence that the position of an option, and not only its quality, can shape what gets chosen, and that the direction of the effect depends on how the options arrive and who is choosing.

Key papers

Mantonakis, A., Rodero, P., Lesschaeve, I., & Hastie, R. (2009). "Order in choice: effects of serial position on preferences." Psychological Science, 20(11), 1309-1312. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02453.x.

Key ideas

See The Primacy Effect and The Recency Effect.

Sources

  1. Mantonakis, Rodero, Lesschaeve and Hastie (2009), abstract read (Europe PMC), 12 October 2026.