HALF TIME THOUGHTS, EPISODE 24: RECENCY AND THE LAST STRAW

What did you read right before you opened this article? Can you recall the five things you read before that?

When was the last time you suffered an injury? Do you remember what caused it?

You should have no serious difficulty answering any of these questions. However, listing the earliest pieces of reading might have become harder – perhaps reaching the less-specific “it was something about data science” level – and what you say caused that injury is likely incorrect.

Incorrect? How can I know that? Stay tuned.

In this article, we’ll explore two cognitive biases that I find most intriguing: the recency effect and our tendency to misattribute causality to the last step in a process.

The more I think about them, the more I realize they are affecting my life and the more ways I find to take advantage of them in my work.

The Recency Effect

“After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people's judgement of the odds – their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater – told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds.”

– Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project

The recency effect is a cognitive bias in which items, ideas, or arguments that came last are remembered more clearly than those that came first.

If you are trying to memorize a list of items, the recency effect means you are more likely to remember the items from the end of the list – the ones that you studied last.

This memory bias causes us to give greater importance to the most recent event and less to historic ones.

It places greater emphasis on a lawyer's closing argument, which a jury hears just before being dismissed to deliberate, than on the body of evidence presented to them earlier in the trial.

You found it easier to remember the most recently read article because of this effect.

Cognitive scientific research has shown a normal human brain can hold up to seven items in short-term memory.?

You approached or even reached that limit when I asked you to recall the second through sixth items you read most recently because, unless you read them back-to-back in one sitting, other things likely displaced them from your seven-item memory bank.

A second effect, known as primacy, involves rehearsing items until they enter long-term memory.

Both were originally exposed in the landmark 1966 study “The Primacy and Recency Effects”, conducted by Glanzer and Cunitz.?

Their work tested a novel Multi-Store Model of Memory (MSM) that has since become a mainstay in cognitive science.

How does this affect you and me?

For starters, we’re kidding ourselves if we think we’re going to remember more than a handful of ideas for very long without investing some serious effort.

Turning that around, we’re equally delusional if we think someone to whom we’re imparting information – a meeting attendee or presentation audience member perhaps – is going to remember a shopping list of points.

On the positive side, you can position the items that you most want to remember (or have your audience remember) at the beginning or end of a list, article, or presentation.

Have you been told to ensure the key point in your report appears clearly in both the introduction and the conclusions?

This isn’t just because readers tend to skim long documents and focus their attention on the first and last sections. It’s also because the primacy effect causes them to remember what they read first, and the recency effect leaves the last few items in their short-term memory.

I recently heard another interesting application while listening to Methods of Persuasion by Nick Kolenda.?

He proposes that job applicants who are asked when they might be available to interview take one of two approaches:

• If they are aware that a hiring decision will be made quickly (perhaps the same or next day), they should try to be one of the last candidates interviewed. Asking for an appointment as late on the interviewer’s schedule as possible maximizes their chances of benefitting from the recency effect.
• Conversely, if the decision might not be made for some time (days or weeks), they should try to be one of the first candidates interviewed, to take advantage of the primacy effect.

I’m considering these effects as I write content, build webpages, assemble presentation slides, plan phone calls, and even before a dinner table conversation with my kids.

The Last Straw

“Nobody is an overnight success. Most overnight successes you see have been working at it for ten years.”

– David Heinemeier Hansson, Danish programmer, creator of Ruby on Rails

The second cognitive bias is a type of misattribution.

We get über-focused on the last thing that happened, right before some critical event, and we attribute the outcome almost entirely to that step.

It might be a bad thing – the “straw that broke the camel’s back” – like your final move before losing a game or the last financial quarter before a stock bubble burst.

Or it might be a good thing – the “overnight success” – such as the goal that won the game, the song that made an artist famous, or the speech a candidate gave before winning the election.

In either case, the thing that happened right at the end usually wasn’t nearly as important as the multitude of things that preceded it.

Things go badly (or well) because of a series of decisions and actions, not just the last one in the chain.

It might begin with a poorly formulated strategy.

Things could get off track because a key team member leaves for a better position – or a poor hire joins the team and poisons the culture.?

It could be the seemingly trivial design change that helped the whole customer experience run more smoothly.

As Seth Godin writes: “these are the acts with leverage, not the obvious thing that all the pundits would like to talk about.”

By the time a major decision point is imminent, it’s almost certainly too late to change the outcome.

Pay attention to the decisions you’re making along the way.?To the weak signals that someone or something might not be quite right.?

Changes made at those key moments – when the stakes seem low but the effort you’re putting in seems excessive – are much more likely to make a difference in the long run.

When I asked you about your most recent injury you probably remembered it very clearly. Perhaps you cut your finger with the vegetable knife, or you slipped on the stairs and bruised your backside. Hopefully it wasn’t anything much more serious.

Thinking back, do you see any earlier actions or decisions that might have contributed to the incident?

Using a vegetable knife to cut vegetables seems like a sensible move.?And, unless you were proceeding with haste, walking down a flight of stairs isn’t wildly risky.

Perhaps you were chopping the veggies on a slippery surface instead of a cutting board because the latter needed washing and you couldn’t be bothered.

Or perhaps your hands were wet, and it seemed an unnecessary effort to dry them before picking up the knife.

Were you wearing socks when you slipped, even though you probably know they increase the risk of losing grip on the stair edge?

Were you carrying too many things to avoid having to make another trip up and down, preventing you from seeing the edge of the stair?

Or perhaps you were hurrying because some earlier miscalculation had left you short of time and late for an appointment.

Sadly, these cognitive tendencies mean we’re wired to focus on that last action or decision and make us much less competent at intercepting and correcting those contributory factors.

If only we could just stop and think.?

It’s why we need structured processes, such as After-Action Reviews, to help us properly diagnose situations and improve for the future.

Like the recency effect, this bias has many implications and applications in day-to-day life.

As a strategy consultant, I frequently work with clients who are trying to solve their most recent problems without looking further back along the chain of causality.

Sales are attributed to the last person who interacted with the client, failing to recognize or reward the (many) earlier touchpoints that did the work of persuading them to buy. The same can often be said for opportunities lost.

The sudden resignation of a key employee is blamed on a recent incident rather than considering the accumulation of smaller grievances in the months before.

Late delivery is blamed on the unavailability of a truck driver when the product could have been shipped days earlier had inefficiencies in the manufacturing process been addressed rather than ignored.

What examples can you spot in your life and workplace?

The Last Word

Given the subject of this article, I’d be an idiot not to leave you with the main point I want you to remember, right?

In practice, it depends.

If you will do something with this information in the next few hours, the recency effect means the last thing you read will be the easiest to recall.

However, if I want you to remember something for later, it should have been the first memorable thing you encountered in this article.

As a reminder, that was a quick demonstration of the recency effect, achieved by asking you to recall the last few things you’d been reading.

Well, what do you know? Bookending my article with the same concept and helping you rehearse it into long-term memory.?Primacy and recency in action!

PS:?Your impression of this article will be heavily influenced by the last action it takes to get its point across (this summary section, which some may find contrived). Hopefully you will stop to think beyond your primal instinct and find value in the explanations given earlier!

Photo by Saj Shafique on Unsplash