The Psychological Pull of Rankings and Top Lists

New research examines how the psychology of rankings affects decision-making.

Reviewed by Davia Sills

Key points

• Rankings and lists appear frequently online, and they tend to attract attention and interest.
• Research shows that people's choices are influenced by the length of a "top" list.
• How much an item's rank has changed on a "top" list can also affect people's decision-making.
• Research finds that the source of the list (i.e., by who created the list) makes a meaningful difference.

Imagine that you are visiting my hometown of Seattle next weekend and turn to your favorite search engine to help you plan the trip. Maybe you search for “Seattle tourist attractions,” “restaurants in Ballard,” or “live music in Capitol Hill.”

No matter your search query, the odds are high that you’ll come across a list within the first few search results, such as “25 Top Things to Do in Seattle” or “The Best Restaurants In Ballard.” Why? It turns out that lists and rankings are a popular and effective way to convey information. And because people just can’t seem to get enough of them, many of the content creators who are competing for our eyeballs—from influencers to content marketers to media entities—have become list-makers themselves.

Almost two years ago, I wrote a piece for Poets&Quants about ranked lists (cross-posted to my Psychology Today blog) focusing specifically on their prevalence, especially online. If anything, lists—which can be defined as a set of connected and typically ranked items that are presented consecutively—are even more ubiquitous now than ever before. As evidence, look no further than books with titles such as The Ultimate Book of Top Ten Lists or The Curious Book of Lists—or the rankings that proliferate across the media that cover graduate business education, like P&Q. There’s also the website Ranker.com, which includes over 100,000 lists and garners over 30 million unique visitors each month—and there’s even a Wikipedia entry for “a list of lists of lists,” which contains a list of webpages that are actually lists of other list articles.

In my last piece, I highlighted a few findings from my own program of research on the psychology of lists—specifically, how attention, categorization, and inferential reasoning influence the judgments and choices that people make after viewing entire ranked lists or the ranked list claims that marketers make (e.g., “We’re ranked in the top 10”). This time, I focus on newly published work, mostly conducted by other scholars, that provides even more nuance into the psychology of lists and rankings. Here are the high-level takeaways:

1. Length matters: The same ranked item seems better if it is on a longer list.​​​​​

In a new paper in the Journal of Marketing Research, Drs. Vivian Lee, Fengyan Cai, and Rajesh Bagchi find evidence of a “rank length effect,” whereby the same ranked item seems better if it is presented as part of a longer list. For example, the authors showed that the second-ranked movie out of IMDB’s Top 250 movies—The Godfather—was rated more positively when study participants were shown a longer list of IMDB’s top 20 movies as opposed to a shorter list of IMDB’s top three movies.

The effect, which occurs even when all participants are informed that the full IMDB list contains 250 movies, results from the process of “narrow focusing.” People narrowly attend to the items they are shown—either 20 or three in The Godfather example—and map these items onto a mental number line when making their evaluations. As a result, being ranked second out of 20 seems much better than being ranked second out of three! The rank length effect influences consumers’ choices and even how much they are willing to pay for products, so it’s worth being aware of this bias.

2. Trajectory matters: The same ranked item seems better if it has moved up versus moved down.

In another recent paper in the Journal of Marketing Research, Drs. Arpita Pandey, Sanjeev Tripathi, and Shelly Jain show that individuals are sensitive to rank dynamics or how rankings change over time. Specifically, they find evidence of “psychological momentum” associated with rank changes, such that people don’t just focus on an item’s current rank in isolation but also reward rank improvements while penalizing rank declines.

In other words, restaurant patrons aren’t just making their decision to dine at Black Bottle Seattle solely based on its current number five ranking by Resy Seattle but are also considering how the restaurant’s rank has changed over time—assuming they have access to this information, of course. The takeaway for brands is that they need to be sure to highlight improvement and not just their current position on a ranked list. On the other hand, brands whose rank has fallen over time need to either de-emphasize this information or, better yet, explain it and indicate how they intend to change the brand’s trajectory in the future.

3. Source attribution matters: The same ranked item seems better if the list maker is prominently featured in the rank claim.

Brands often want to brag when they are included on a list maker’s “top” list. For example, the undergraduate marketing program at Seattle University, where I teach, was recently ranked for the first time on U.S. News & World Report’s list of top marketing programs at number 21. This is exactly the kind of ranking that our program wants to broadcast to prospective students, alumni, and donors on its website and social media channels. The question is: How prominently (if at all) should we mention the list maker (e.g., U.S. News) when describing an accolade (e.g., being ranked 21st)?

An article that I wrote for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Signage and Wayfinding attempts to answer this question. On the one hand, mentioning and describing the list maker can complicate messaging and take up valuable real estate on a digital banner or a physical sign. On the other hand, attribution can convey that the brand’s ranking was determined by a legitimate list maker (e.g., a reputable expert).

My research finds that when brands make rank claims, the net effect of source attribution tends to be positive for the brand. Even if it means that the rank claim itself will need to be written in a smaller font so that source information can fit on the same ad, the credibility boost that brands enjoy from source attribution makes it worthwhile (as long as consumers are familiar with the source and perceive it to be reasonably credible, of course).

Collectively, the take-home message from the latest list research is that users of third-party lists and rankings are actually pretty sophisticated: When making judgments, consumers of ranked lists are sensitive to list length, ranked-item trajectory (i.e., rank changes over time), and source attribution. For brands, being selected by a list maker to be on a top-ranked list is only half the battle. In many ways, figuring out how to communicate this accolade most effectively represents the greater challenge.

This post also appeared on Poets & Quants.