Recency bias Recency bias is a cognitive bias that favors recent events over historic ones. A type of memory bias, recency bias gives "greater importance to the most recent event", such as the final lawyer's closing argument a jury hears before being dismissed to deliberate. Recency bias should not be confused with anchoring or confirmation bias. Recency bias is related to the serial-position effect known as the recency effect. It is not to be confused with recency illusion, the belief or impression that a word or language usage is of recent origin when in reality it is long-established. ## History Livy, writing in the 1st century BC, described recency bias in his preface to History of Rome: I have very little doubt, too, that for the majority of my readers the earliest times and those immediately succeeding, will possess little attraction; they will hurry on to these modern days in which the might of a long paramount nation is wasting by internal decay. — Livy, History of Rome, Preface ## Occurrences It commonly appears in employee evaluations, as a distortion in favor of recently completed activities or recollections, and can be reinforced or offset by the halo effect. I