Is Recent Better?
We are more likely to favor, to support, and to appraise a more recent thing better than those before it even if those before it have had a stellar performance.
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At the beginning of the Premier League season that ended yesterday, one man had star performances almost weekly. He would score goals and assist his teammates in scoring goals. His fans loved him. Rival fans admired him (sometimes loathed him) and wished he played for them. The fans had a song for him; his feet rewarded their support. As the season went on, so did his performance.
Then his performance slowed down. He soon took a break to represent his country at the African Cup of Nations (AFCON) where he got to the final and lost to his club football colleague.
When he returned to England to continue top-flight football, his performance was not as jaw-dropping as it used to be but he delivered. He helped his teammates, he represented his team fiercely and by the end of the Premier League season yesterday, he was both the highest goal scorer and had the highest assist made.
But this man, Mohammed Salah, was not named the season’s player of the year. It was someone else entirely who won the award. The man he lost to was Kevin De Bruyne.
Kevin’s story is simple: he struggled at the beginning of the season. He had a few rocket performances but it was not consistent. As the season progressed, so did his performance. When Salah’s performance slowed down, he started scoring screamer goals and making insane assists.
Despite this, Salah was the playmaker of the year and goal scorer of the year. But when it was time to vote for the player of the year, the votes went to the person who recently started doing what Salah had been doing all season.
Why?
Recency Effect/Bias
Per Science Direct:
“The recency effect is a cognitive bias in which those items, ideas, or arguments that came last are remembered more clearly than those that came first. The more recently heard, the clearer something may exist in a juror's memory.”
You are more likely to remember the most recent thing someone did for you (good or bad) than something they did for you many years ago. You are more likely to remember a colleague’s performance from last week than from the last month. You are likely to remember Kevin De Bruye scoring a hat trick last week than Salah scoring a hat trick before then.
ThoughtCo. notes that “While the recency effect has long been studied by psychologists who study memory, social psychologists have also explored whether the ordering of information can affect how we perceive others. As an example, imagine that your friend is describing someone they want to introduce you to, and they describe this person as kind, smart, generous, and boring. Because of the recency effect, the last item on the list—boring—might have a disproportionate effect on your judgment of the person, and you might have a less positive impression of them (compared to if boring had been in the middle of the list of words).”
As Simon Laham and Joseph Forgas explain, “we can experience a recency effect or a primacy effect (where the adjectives presented first have a stronger impact), depending on the circumstances. For example, we’re more likely to experience a recency effect if we’re given a long list of information about the person, or if we’re asked to form an impression of the person right after we’re given information about them. On the other hand, we’d be more strongly impacted by the first items in a list if we know in advance that we’re going to be asked to form an impression of the person.”
Salah was good enough, he just was not recent enough.
The good thing is everyone is guilty of this. The bad thing is everyone is guilty of this. Individually, we may try to curtail our biases by trying to be more objective and introspecting better before making decisions. This is also a call for us to always endeavour to see a full picture before forming an opinion on something or someone.
There might be better performers/performances, only that they are not recent.
TEA
Last week, I made an announcement that I was about to release what would for a while be the best work I had done as a journalist:
Over the weekend, the work did come out and you know what the reviews have been saying? That I was too humble in talking about the work. Don’t be that person that is off the awesomeness train. Cop your copy, now:
Until the next NAN, be kind to yourself and the world around you; be patient with yourself and others; love yourself and the people around you; do not give up on things that matter to you unless giving up will provide you more peace and security.