Is recency bias harming your writing?

Even if you don’t know it by name,?I’ll bet you’ve experienced recency bias. That’s the formal name for the human tendency to remember recent events over more distant ones.?

You have displayed recency bias?every time you thought a movie should win best picture at the Oscars because you saw it in January, or you bought a particular stock because you just read about it in the news, or you selected a job candidate because she was the last person you interviewed.

In fact, recency bias played into our unpreparedness for the COVID-19 pandemic. Here is what Bloomberg Opinion columnist Tyler Cowen had to say about it in?a column in January :??

“The view that America was unprepared for a pandemic is another example of recency bias,” he wrote. “The AIDS epidemic, which has?killed?possibly 35 million people worldwide in the last four decades, should have instilled the need for better planning, but many Americans saw that disease as something unlikely to happen to them. Major generalized pandemics, meanwhile, were perceived as something of the distant past. Yet the more accurate, longer-term reality is this: Pandemics have recurred, albeit with varying lags, throughout human history.”

Recency bias, which was identified by the relatively new field of behavioural economics?(in which Nobel-prize winning Daniel Kahneman — author of the best-selling book?Thinking Fast and Slow ?— is a leader) seems to most seriously affect investors and business executives. But it also has an impact on writers as well.

I know because?it used to affect me, too.

If you’ve ever had a bad writing experience, those negative feelings will colour your attitude towards the writing you do in the future. And bad experiences are far more powerful than happy ones. Similar to the?Gottman ratio ?predicting successful relationships (”Happy couples have at least five positive interactions for every negative one”) happy writers also need at least a 5:1 ratio of positive experiences to negative ones.?

I have worked with many writers?who’ve exhibited a response somewhat like?Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder ?to the job of putting words on the page. Why? A teacher, a boss or a supervisor said something indelibly hurtful or mean to them, and they’ve never recovered from it. The thought has then percolated at the back of their minds, sometimes for years, and it haunts them every time they try to write. I call this recency bias on steroids.?

But even those who are lucky enough?to have avoided long-term trauma can find it exceptionally difficult to recover from a recent writing project that’s gone bad. Why? Because we’re reluctant to focus on our own lack of success and we want to??ignore?bad news. Instead of figuring out what went wrong and learning how to change it, we push it out of our minds and hope it won’t happen again.?

Roughly 25 years ago,?I felt that way about writing. I was an excellent editor who preferred to steer clear of the other side of the equation. As a result, I?avoided?writing. Trouble was, when I decided to leave the newspaper business and become a freelancer, I knew I’d have to start writing again.

I had no interest in a day-to-day life?that made me miserable, so I resolved to change my I-hate-writing attitude. So, I spent six months of reading, researching and experimenting, before I finally uncovered my biggest barrier: I was editing while I wrote. As soon as I broke that habit, I not only doubled my writing speed, I also turned writing into something I enjoyed doing.

More recently,?I dealt with another long-term bad habit: my chronic lateness in getting my financial books to my bookkeeper. This is a job I’ve struggled with for more than a decade and had made significant progress with it in the last several years. But last summer, I had to deal with a serious family crisis and my invoices, receipts, bits and bobs — everything financial — accumulated in a wire basket on my desk. Until early January, when I knew I couldn’t avoid it any longer.

But here’s what was different this time: Over recent years, I’ve built such robust systems that I was able to plow through the basket in two days, find missing receipts in one more and get everything to my bookkeeper?weeks?ahead of schedule. (The business tax deadline in Canada was the end of February.) Score: one positive experience.

Recency bias?— whether it’s really recent, or something that’s accumulated over many years — needn’t doom you to unhappiness. Examine your most recent negative writing experience. Do your best to see what caused it, and then try changing?your methods so it doesn’t happen again.?

Make the choice to flip your?ratio?of positive experiences to negative ones and you, too, can become a happier writer. Let me know?if?I can help .?

This post first appeared on The Publication Coach blog .