Imagine you are a hiring manager weighing two internal candidates for a promotion. One is ranked 3rd among the 12 people on her team. The other is ranked 6th among 24. Do the math and the two are identical: both sit at the 25th percentile, each outperforming three-quarters of their colleagues. Yet many managers do not treat them as equal. They lean toward the person from the smaller team.
That tilt is the subject of a study published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Across eight experiments, the researchers find a steady preference for options ranked within shorter lists over options with the same relative standing in longer lists. The pattern showed up in hiring choices, product picks, and bonus decisions, and the authors trace it to a single habit of mind: when people read a ranking, they pay most attention to how far an option sits from the top.
The question hiding inside every ranked list
Rankings are everywhere. Bestseller lists, college rankings, the Fortune 500, Amazon’s product categories, TripAdvisor’s “things to do,” and corporate performance reviews all sort options from best to worst. The authors note that stack ranking, in which a company orders all its employees and pushes the lowest-ranked toward improvement plans or the exit, is used by an estimated 30 percent of Fortune 500 companies.
Every ranked list hands you two pieces of information at once. There is the option’s position in the list, such as 4th place, and there is the length of the list, such as 16 items total. Combine them and you get the option’s relative standing, or percentile. The study set out to learn which of these pieces of information people actually use, and how they blend them together.
Uri Barnea of Bocconi University, Alice Moon of Georgetown University, and Jackie Silverman of Vanderbilt University, who contributed equally to the work, propose that people do not weigh these inputs evenly. They argue that when someone evaluates a ranked option, they focus mainly on its distance from the best item on the list, rather than its distance from the worst item or its overall percentile. Because an option in a shorter list is automatically closer to the top spot, it tends to look better, even when its percentile is identical to a longer-list rival.
Testing the hunch across hiring, products, and pens
The team ran eight preregistered experiments with a combined 4,455 participants, plus two more in an online appendix. Preregistration means the researchers committed to their hypotheses and analysis plans before collecting data, a practice meant to reduce after-the-fact cherry-picking.
The first study recruited 301 people with real managerial experience, most of whom currently or previously held jobs involving hiring decisions. They evaluated a candidate ranked either 3rd of 12 or 6th of 24 in her department. Participants rated the candidate from the shorter list more positively, and when asked to choose between two candidates from different-sized teams, 61 percent picked the one from the smaller team.
To check whether the effect reached beyond hypothetical scenarios, the researchers moved into product choices. In one study, 300 participants browsed realistic listings adapted from travel websites and chose between restaurants, hiking trails, and historic homes. In every case, the option from the shorter list won more votes. Another study gave 317 students a real choice between two pens, one ranked 2nd of 8 and one ranked 4th of 16 on their makers’ websites. The students actually received the pen they chose, and 63 percent picked the shorter-list option.
Pushing the pattern to its limits
The researchers then tried to break the effect. In one study, they stacked the deck against their own prediction by making the shorter-list product worse on paper. Participants chose between a water bottle ranked 2nd of 8 (the 25th percentile) and one ranked 4th of 20 (the 20th percentile, a better relative standing). The shorter-list bottle still drew more buyers, with 57 percent choosing it. The authors describe this as evidence that the preference can steer people toward objectively weaker choices.
Another study asked whether the pattern would flip for poorly ranked options. If people anchored on the bottom of the list, an option near the bottom of a long list would look better because it sits farther from last place. Participants chose between pizzerias ranked at either the 10th percentile (well-ranked) or the 90th percentile (poorly ranked). The preference for the shorter list held in both cases, with no meaningful difference between them. This result suggests that people do not lean on whichever endpoint is nearest. They keep their eyes on the top.
Why the top of the list wins attention
Several studies probed the reasoning behind the effect. In one, 600 participants chose between two beaches and then rated how much they had considered each piece of ranking information. On average, people said they weighed rank position more than list length. The more someone reported focusing on rank position, the more they favored the shorter-list beach; the more they focused on list length, the more they leaned the other way.
The researchers offer a few reasons the top spot grabs the most attention. The top-ranked item is usually the most attractive and the most talked-about, so it serves as a natural yardstick. Rank position also carries a clear meaning on its own. Knowing something is ranked 3rd tells you immediately that two options beat it, while the number of options below it stays fuzzy, especially since lists are often incomplete. As the authors put it, “there may be ambiguity about the full extent of what comes below a ranked option,” but “people can be more certain of how far it is from the top of the list.”
Two more studies showed the effect could be dialed up or down. When a description spelled out how many restaurants a focal pizzeria had beaten, the preference for the shorter list shrank. When the description emphasized how many restaurants ranked above it, the preference grew. And when rankings were presented as percentiles instead of raw positions, the effect not only faded but reversed: participants given percentiles favored the employee from the larger team. Importantly, participants generally judged the overall quality of the two lists to be similar, which suggests the effect is not simply a belief that longer lists contain worse options.
What it means for managers and marketers
The authors point to practical takeaways for anyone who builds, communicates, or acts on rankings. Because team size has no necessary connection to an employee’s true quality, organizations using forced or stack ranking may want to report percentiles alongside or instead of raw ranks to keep managers from favoring people on smaller teams. Companies could also display the total number of ranked items more prominently, or present rankings as a countdown from worst to best to draw attention to list length.
On the marketing side, the findings suggest why a business might advertise being “2nd best in a small town” rather than its standing in a broader pool. The researchers caution against leaning on this too hard, since other work shows longer lists can sometimes help, and extreme claims may invite skepticism.
The authors are candid about the limits of their explanation. They acknowledge that preferring a shorter-list option could be reasonable under certain statistical assumptions about how quality is distributed, though they argue typical decision-makers are unlikely to be running those calculations, and Study 3’s result, where people chose the worse-percentile option, points the same way. They also flag open questions about how expertise, comfort with numbers, and round-number boundaries might change the picture. For now, the work offers evidence that a ranking is rarely read in full. Most of the time, people glance at how close something sits to the top, and judge accordingly.
