Math is great when it’s simple, but then our brain gets involved and complicates everything. Imagine you are on the leadership team for a Big 4 and choosing between two employees for a director-level promotion. One is ranked third out of 12 on her team. The other is ranked sixth out of 24. On paper, both candidates sit at the same relative spot in their groups. Both are in the top quarter. Both have outperformed three-fourths of their peers.
And yet, for many people, third out of 12 just sounds better.
Sixth out of 24? Totally respectable. But third out of 12 just has that sparkle. Third is closer to first, after all. Third feels like someone right there in the mix. Maybe sixth didn’t fare as well in those weekly huddles. Sixth sounds like the person you remember only after someone asks, “Wait, who else do we have to consider?”
Our brains are silly. These mental shortcuts and ways of visualizing information get the best of us. And it’s exactly these kind of small, ordinary judgments that Associate Professor of Marketing Jackie Silverman relishes studying. That moment where information looks objective, but our interpretation of it becomes misconstrued.
In a recent paper co-authored with Uri Barnea of Bocconi University and Alice Moon of Georgetown University, Silverman examines how people evaluate rankings when they know both the option’s position and the length of the list. The core finding codifies what many of us are guilty of: preferring options ranked within shorter lists over options with equivalent relative standings in longer lists.
The paper’s opening example makes this mental gap clear. A candidate ranked third out of 12 and a candidate ranked sixth out of 24 are both at the 25th percentile. A perfectly calculating, evidence-based decision-maker should treat those rankings as equivalent. But across a series of experiments, time and time again, participants fell short of mathematical excellence, favoring the shorter-list option. The lower absolute number, the third instead of sixth, second instead of fourth, inevitably comes out ahead.
The quiet reason that explains this very common lapse in judgment appears to be that rankings pull our attention towards the top. When we see that shiny “third,” we instinctively count how many options are above it. Third means two things were better, and if you are not third, you are last…at least in the case of the sixth. But that visual difference means something, even in cases when list lengths tell a much more favorable story for that unlucky sixth.
What we are less likely to do is look down. A person ranked sixth out of 24 is above 18 others. A person ranked third out of 12 is above nine. That longer-list candidate has cleared more people. They are the real go-getter, but the nine places that sixth has a leg up on are just not as psychologically loud enough.
Silverman and her co-authors test this tendency across contexts. Rankings are everywhere. We use them to pick restaurants, products, hikes, schools, doctors, vacation spots, employees, and probably, at some point, those 800 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets. Rankings promise clarity. They are meant to save us from the fog of too many options. We are overly stimulated individuals living in an overly stimulated world amid an age of AI and rapid digitalization. But ultimately, the paper shows that rankings can also create their own kind of fog, particularly when the number that catches our eye is not the number that should guide the decision.
One of the most interesting parts of the research is that the effect does not disappear when the stakes become more concrete. In one study, participants with managerial experience evaluated job candidates, much like our opening story, and the candidate ranked on the shorter list was chosen more often. In another, participants made an actual product choice between pens, and again, more picked the product ranked on the shorter list. This pattern held across restaurants, hiking trails, historic homes, beaches, and employee bonuses.
It is not just a quirk of an inefficient hiring process. It’s demonstrative of a broader habit of interpretation.
That said, the paper also shows that this bias can be softened. When people are pushed to consider how many alternatives a ranked option beats, or when rankings are communicated as percentiles, the shorter-list advantage weakens. As with any proper decision making, further context must be taken into account. Rankings are not created as decorations. They carry weight.
For companies, these findings matter because rankings can exert a heavy influence over how consumers choose. A product ranked second out of eight may look more attractive than one ranked fourth out of 16, even if the two are equally strong relative to their categories. For managers, the stakes may be even higher. If organizations use rankings to evaluate employees across teams of different sizes, the way that information is presented could shape who gets hired, promoted, rewarded, or overlooked.
Rankings are a clean way to display complicated, involved data. But clean does not equate to complete.
Silverman’s research reminds us that people do not necessarily process information in an objective manner. We translate it, simplify it, and sometimes, let the wrong part of it boss us around or cloud our judgement. The number closest to the top tends to speak the loudest. The denominator, the percentile, the broader context — all the things that make the ranking actually meaningful — inevitably have to fight for the spotlight.
So, the next time that $40 shampoo at Whole Foods is proudly advertised as “ranked #3,” it may be worth asking the question: Out of how many?
Maybe it’s the best, maybe it’s the same as sixth. If this research tells us anything, it’s that context is everything.
Access the original article, “How Rank Position and List Length Shape People’s Evaluations.”