Analysing your IQ
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AKA: "What Have You Done Lately Effect"
The tendency to weigh recent events more heavily than earlier ones when making judgments.
Recency Bias affects everyone, including (especially) people who think they're immune. The first step to fixing it is understanding how it works.
You judge an employee's year by their last month. You extrapolate recent stock returns into the future.
This bias is particularly dangerous because it operates below conscious awareness. By the time you notice it, the damage is often done.
This error is driven by Recent memories are more accessible and vivid, hijacking probability estimates and pattern recognition..
Evolution optimized for speed and safety, not truth. Recency Bias is a byproduct of heuristics that once had adaptive value.
In investing: Recency Bias leads to holding losing positions too long or selling winners too early.
In relationships: This bias causes people to interpret ambiguous signals in ways that confirm existing beliefs about partners.
In work: Recency Bias makes it harder to update strategies when market conditions change.
In health: People ignore symptoms that contradict their self-image as "healthy" or "young."
Experiments on Recency Bias often use controlled conditions that make the bias obvious to observers—yet participants still fall for it. This demonstrates how powerful the effect is.
Force yourself to review the full timeline. Weight data proportionally, not by how fresh it feels.
Seek disconfirming evidence: Actively look for data that challenges your current belief.
Use decision journals: Write down predictions before outcomes are known, then review accuracy.
Consult diverse perspectives: People with different backgrounds spot different biases.
Implement decision rules: Pre-commit to criteria before emotionally charged situations arise.
Time-box decisions: Revisit important conclusions after a cooling-off period.
Some brains are more susceptible to this than others. Test your Discipline to find out.
The tendency to weigh recent events more heavily than earlier ones when making judgments.
The alternate name "What Have You Done Lately Effect" captures the intuitive essence of the bias. Recency Bias is the formal psychological term, while "What Have You Done Lately Effect" describes what it feels like in practice.
Force yourself to review the full timeline. Weight data proportionally, not by how fresh it feels.
The underlying mechanism is recent memories are more accessible and vivid, hijacking probability estimates and pattern recognition.. Human brains evolved heuristics for speed and survival, not accuracy in modern contexts.
Yes. Intelligence doesn't provide immunity—sometimes it makes the bias worse because smart people are better at rationalizing. Awareness and structured decision processes are more protective than raw IQ.
You judge an employee's year by their last month. You extrapolate recent stock returns into the future.