@kyle_wm interesting, hadn’t heard of Serial Position Effect! And I like your dad’s terms. But what I was getting at (and inevitably didn’t communicate well) was not exactly that the items at the ends of a series are given greater mental weight, but that the relative orders of items at the ends is more emphasised than relative weights in the middle.

E.G. in the example on that wikipedia page, of “smart, diligent, critical, impulsive, and jealous”, I suspect that the differences rank differences of (smart and diligent), and (implusive and jealous) are seen as more significant than of (diligent, critical) or (critical, implusive). Not sure if science backs this up (how would that even be measured?), but it’s something I’ve noticed.