LESSON EIGHT: Stuck in the Middle

MAKE A LIST: On a spreadsheet, catalogue your top one hundred favorite movies, songs, or books of all time. Now look up and enter the date each was released. Sort by that date and look at how many of your choices were recent, say the last five or ten years, versus in the distant past. Has literature, movie making, or songwriting gotten so much better recently? Hardly. But remembering is hard and recency bias is easy. 

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Google Play

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SHARPEN YOUR KNIVES: Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare, is available on Google Play as an e book with voice output. I find it especially fun to read during the month of March. Et tu? 

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ROME IF YOU WANT TO: Tune in for Rome, Season 1 (2005). Before HBO had an over-sexed, blood-drenched mini-series with dragons, they had an over-sexed, blood-drenched mini- series with legions. Watch Caesar cross the Rubicon and descend on Rome while intrigues play out amongst the nobility and plebs alike. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t end well for Caesar. 

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RUN AWAY: Train for a marathon. At the end, you will discover that the race had a fanfare beginning, a long torturous middle, and a merciful end. But you won’t remember much except the thrill of finishing. At least, so I have heard. Race promoters can thank the recency effect for filling fun runs and long-distance races nationwide. If it weren’t for this mental bias, the hours of pain would overshadow the achievement, and no one would ever run more than one. 

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HAVE A WINNING FANTASY: Less of a go getter? Perhaps you are one of the dozen or so people in America who still isn’t playing fantasy sports? Sign up and start drafting your team. Keep a tally counting the number of times you engage in recency bias while evaluating a player. Are you letting last year’s stats determine much of the rating instead of the overall prospect? Player age, coaching, and type of system matter just as much if not more. Perhaps it is recency bias that has kept you from hoisting the league trophy all these long years.