What is Recency Bias?

Recency bias is a form of cognitive bias in which people give more weight to recent events or information than those that happened further back in the past. This can lead to inaccurate conclusions, as it ignores valuable data from prior events and experiences. 

For example, when assessing a company’s financial performance, recency bias will only take into account the most current quarter’s results, ignoring the history of the company's growth over time. Similarly, when making decisions based on customer reviews online, recency bias will cause someone to pay too much attention to recently posted comments while disregarding older reviews that may be more accurate and reflective of the overall customer experience. 

It’s important to understand how recency bias can affect your decision-making process. Studies have found that people are more likely to remember recently experienced events and occurrences over those in the past, with an average recall rate of 30% for recent memories compared to only 8% for memories from further away. If a company wants to accurately assess how well their product is selling or how satisfied customers are, they need to take into account all relevant data points and not just the most recent ones. 

By recognizing and understanding recency bias, you can ensure that important decisions are made based on facts rather than faulty memory or assumptions. Taking a step back to look at the bigger picture will help you make better choices and avoid errors caused by cognitive biases like recency bias.   This, in turn, will help you make more informed decisions that are better for your business in the long run. 

Recency bias can be difficult to detect due to its subtle nature. It’s important to pay attention to all relevant data points and not just the most recent ones when making decisions or forming opinions. Taking a step back, gathering more information, and looking at the bigger picture is key to avoiding recency bias and making informed decisions instead of relying on assumptions or faulty memory.  By recognizing and understanding recency bias, you can ensure that important decisions are based on facts rather than faulty memory or assumptions. This will help you make more accurate assessments of your product’s performance or customer satisfaction and lead to better decision-making.

Studies have shown that recency bias has a huge impact on our memories and decision-making processes. In one study, participants were asked to recall the order of words from a list. Those who had only seen the words recently were more likely to remember them than those who had seen them earlier in the list. Another study found that people are more likely to make decisions based on recent experiences than on past ones. This can lead to faulty assumptions and conclusions about products or services if all of the relevant data isn’t taken into account. 

Recency bias is difficult to overcome because we naturally rely more heavily on recent information when making decisions. It’s important to be aware of this tendency and take steps to ensure we’re considering all available information in our decisions. This can be done by taking the time to research past experiences and data, considering both short-term and long-term consequences of our decisions, seeking out more than one opinion from trusted sources, and taking a step back from any decision that feels rushed.  Taking these steps will help ensure that our decisions are based on accurate information, rather than simply what is most recent.  With this method, we can make more informed choices that better reflect reality. 

By understanding recency bias and its effects on decision-making, we can take measures to mitigate its influence and use sound judgment when it comes to making important choices. Knowing how this kind of bias works can help.

The recruiting sector is where the impact of recent hiring can be greatest observed. We now have technologies like EasySource that can help remove recency bias thanks to the development of AI and ChatGPT. EasySource is a tool created for recruiters that facilitates candidate outreach using LinkedIn and is priced for smaller businesses (it is also free for a finite number of credits). EasySource may assist you in personalizing your process with pre-made templates and is effective at finding highly relevant prospects using sophisticated filters, which can even absorb individuals who have US work authorization. Using ChatgPT and AI, you can also create highly tailored LinkedIn inmails, gmails, and LinkedIn invites.