Today is saturday and I have spent some of my time by surfing the internet. And by "surfing" I don't mean scrolling YouTube or X, but the more traditional way of doing it: Browsing the web for independent sites and following links to see where they take me. When you do that, anything can happen.
You may strike some real gems and get an insightful read out of them. You may bump into a bunch of abandoned sites that don't work anymore. And there are many things in between these two extremes. And when I come across a site that grabs my attention, one of the first things I want to know is when the latest post was published. No matter how many good posts the site may have - it is a bummer when nothing has been going on there for over a year. There is a psychological effect to such a gap. It overshadows all of the effort that the author has put into his project before that long (or permanent) break.
This is the recency bias that this post is about. And this bias is everywhere! It is especially potent on social media sites. Think about the last time you have been consciously looking something up on YouTube. You may be looking for a DIY tutorial or some commentary on any topic, and you see two video thumbnails next to eachother. Which video will you click if one is from yesterday and one is from 8 years ago? You will probably go with the new video, despite the higher chance that it could be based on flimsy AI research. Or, it could be entirely AI generated. All the while, the older video may be no worse in terms of quality - it may even have much more of a personal note, beating the newer video in terms of originality.
Said effect also takes place outside of the internet, including, out of all places, in literature! While there are some timeless classics, I would much rather get a book on, let's say, medieval Europe from the 2010s over one from the 1980s. And there is some legitimate reason for that. A newer book is more likely to include the findings of recent, rigorous research (assuming that any such research has happened in a given field, and that the author is taking that to its proper conclusions). I feel justified in this behaviour. It makes a lot of sence. But we can only imagine how many impressive and insightful works of literature and media have been swept away by the ever-agressive tides of time, "just because" we have this tendency to be more interested in new things.
I am not saying that this effect is all bad. And the more we are aware of it, the better we can avoid being blinded by it. As someone who is very interested in the more distant parts of history, I get the feeling that many people talk and behave as if anything that happened before their own lifetime is somehow null and void, completely obsolete, primitive and not worth any investigation or appreciation. History seems to stop at World War II for many people, even though there is so much to learn from what has happened in past centuries and millenia. Yet, here we have people basing their entire worldview on ideas that are no older than 5 minutes on the grand scale of things, and that could well be gone and forgotten in another 5 minutes. Things could be very different if people would appreciate history and read their Bible daily.
Being aware of the recency bias is the reason that I'm keeping the publication dates of my posts invisible for now, even though I do track them in my CMS backend. But this, too, is a double-edged sword. Though it gives a piece of media an air of timelessness, it makes it harder for the reader to "anchor" to it. Afterall, the things we see take place within the bounds of time and we like to be able to place everything on the general timeline of the world. So, I might make the dates visible at some later point. But for now, no dates.
How much of the recency bias is natural, and how much of it have we been conditioned into?