Alphabetical Order
Alphabetical order, in the modern world, is a very common method of collation—putting things in a standardized order—for cultures with languages oriented around alphabets.
The concept is fairly simple, but actually took a while to emerge and then to evolve into its contemporary form.
Many early cultures with languages based on alphabets organized their words, their names, their scrolls, their stories, by chronology—when a piece was written or when the author was born—category—is it an animal with fur or an animal that lives in the water?—or hierarchy, which was one of the more common ways to organize people or work, in particular, with the most prominent or important people at the top of the list, and the socially lesser people at the end.
This was partly the case because, for a long time, learned people would memorize works rather than reference them. And when work did need to be referenced there either wasn't much of it—so memorization of some other collating system, like when a particular book was written, wasn't too difficult a chore—or it was part of a sequence that was so well known that the idea of requiring some other ordering system didn't make any sense to the people involved. The books of the Bible, for instance, were presented in a given order, and the idea of arranging them in some other way seemed unnecessary and borderline sacrilegious.
There were early instances of alphabetical order introduced by scribes in Ancient Egypt, proposed by scholars in Ancient Greece, and utilized by Northwest Semitic scribes back in the 1st millennium BC.
It didn't emerge as a consistent method of collation until late in the 12th Century, though, at which point it was becoming important for previously un-lettered preachers to be literate, and organizing the available religious reference materials for non-scholars was becoming a more vital task.
Coming up with a system of organization that was optimized for anyone who knew how to read, rather than just those who understood the total context of the work in question, began to make more sense around this time, then.
Alphabetical order, in its early iterations, only ordered based on first letters: so 'alpaca,' 'apple,' and 'anxious' would all be considered the same order-value, and would come before all the words that began with 'b,' but would otherwise be lumped together in a jumble.
More detailed variations came later, first by including the second letter in the ordering scheme (so 'aardvark' would come before 'aspect'), then by including the third letter (so 'ankh' would come before 'ant'), and eventually the whole word became part of this system, with each letter being ranked by its order in the alphabet and sequential place in the word.
This approach to collating information is far better, for most purposes, than those that came before. But it's not without flaws, including those that may accidentally introduce bias into our organizational systems.
Order Effects Bias is often controlled for in formal surveys to ameliorate a tendency for people to respond to questions differently based on the order in which they are presented.
Some of these biases orient around an unintentionally established context that the answerer picks up on—one question seeming to influence or refer to the answer of another, previously asked question, for instance—while others are predicated on unintentional framings or states of mind that can emerge from the order of such questions.
Asking someone their opinion about crime in their neighborhood, and then asking how they feel about their neighbors, can unintentionally put them in a defensive, anti-social state of mind—thinking about crime and their concerns related to it—and that can then distort their reported sense about their neighborhood and neighbors more broadly, for a time.
It's also possible that respondents will answer questions more thoroughly or succinctly depending on where they are located on a larger list, and how long the list is.
This is based on the amount of attention and energy they have to spare, so the context surrounding their answering of these questions—have they eaten recently? Do they need to use the restroom? Are they going to have a difficult conversation with a coworker right after the questionnaire?—can also distort their answers. And questions that appear at the top of the list might be answered from a very different state of mind than those further down because of this same effect.
The alphabetizing of names can also distort our perception of the owners of those names.
As someone who's last name starts with 'w,' I can tell you from experience that being at the end of the name-list often relegates you to second-class status when it comes to leaving for recess, roll-calls, or taking your turn trying out the cool science experiment at the front of the class.
More formally, though, some research has shown that alphabetization in the world of scholarship can lead to bias in citations: especially the credit people get for their work, and how often they're referenced in other people's work.
This would seem to have less to do with any kind of biased initial perception of the work in question, and more to do with second-order effects associated with having a name that puts you near the end of name lists.
Folks who show up at the top of ostensibly unbiased lists—including those that show who's responsible for individual research papers, and lists that show existing research on a particular topic—tend to have their work used as evidence to support new assertions more frequently. Those who have names that put them at the top of the alphabetized lists of people who participated in a given research project also tend to have their names repeated and printed more frequently compared to those who are sometimes either left off, or printed beneath those other names.
The long-term consequence of this implied hierarchy and disparity in who is referenced and who isn’t, is that people who have names that put them lower on such (supposedly unbiased) lists will accumulated less prestige and recognition over time, applying a negative sort of Matthew Effect (cumulative advantage) to them and their work, while folks higher up on these lists will, on average, tend to acquire a positive version of the same.
This doesn't mean collation methods like alphabetization are useless or bad, it just means that bias can pop up even within systems that would seem to be as far from biased as you can possibly imagine.
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