preferid

Preferid is a theoretical construct in decision science and cognitive psychology that describes a stable bias in the formation of preferences, whereby individuals tend to favor options presented earlier in a sequence over later ones, even when the later options have equal or greater objective value. The term blends prefer with the suffix id, signaling a dispositional state influencing judgment.

In empirical tasks that present choices sequentially, preferid manifests as a primacy-like effect: early options receive greater attention, encoding, and remembered appeal, and this early advantage can persist during subsequent evaluation and choice. Mechanisms proposed for preferid include memory accessibility and attentional capture, whereby early items benefit from encoding fluency and easier retrieval when comparisons are made.

Preferid has been invoked to explain order effects in surveys, consumer-choice experiments, and online recommendation contexts where items shown first are chosen more often than standard models would predict. It is often difficult to distinguish preferid from the classic primacy effect, exposure bias, or anchoring, and researchers stress careful experimental controls to separate these factors.

As a conceptual construct, preferid has limited direct empirical evidence and remains primarily in theoretical or exploratory discussions of preference formation. It is not a universally adopted term and may appear mainly in hypothetical scenarios or modeling studies. Related concepts include primacy effect, order effects, and attention-based bias.