Meaning & use
recency bias
Last updated
Meaning
noununcountabletechnical
The habit of giving too much weight to recent events or information and too little to older evidence.
Grammar: Often used without an article: recency bias affects judgment. A recency bias is also possible.
Patterns
- recency bias in something
Recency bias made the manager rate the employee on one bad week.
Investors with recency bias assume last month's trend will continue.
Judges can suffer from recency bias when the last performer is fresh in memory.
Common combinations
- fall prey to recency bias
- Many traders fall prey to recency bias.
- guard against recency bias
- Keep records to guard against recency bias.
- recency bias in hiring
- Recency bias in hiring favors the last candidate seen.
- suffer from recency bias
- Voters sometimes suffer from recency bias.
- avoid recency bias
- Reviewing the whole year helps avoid recency bias.
Synonyms and how they differ
- primacy effect
- Primacy effect is the opposite pattern: remembering early items best, rather than the latest.
- availability bias
- Availability bias is about vivid or easy-to-recall examples, whereas recency bias is specifically about how recent they are.
- short-termism
- Short-termism is a business habit of focusing on near-term results, not exactly a memory bias.
Opposites
Word family
Commonly confused: recency bias or word?
recency bias vs word
note
Practice
A teacher grades a student mostly on the last essay and forgets earlier excellent work. This is an example of ___.
Choose one answer.
Recency bias overweights the most recent information. Primacy effect would favor earliest work instead.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “recency bias”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.