Lovingly, we are all at one point victims of the worst, most insidious little worm known to human cognition.

Recency bias.

What does that mean, though? What is recency bias? I'm so glad you asked. Recency bias is a type of cognitive bias or "logical shortcut" our very lazy brains used to make it seem like the newest thing is the best thing. We do this with everything. History, books, house styles, clothing... we place a disproportionate emphasis on the newer thing and out brains convince us it's the best thing.

We also do this with, funny enough, people! When we evaluate another person, we put more weight on the most recent interaction we had with them than we do on our relationship as a whole. It can affect our positive or negative perception of a person! Isn't that crazy?!

Here's the thing about a cognitive bias: to fight back against it, you have to know what it is and be able to ask yourself questions about your own thoughts and feelings. Investigating your own opinions and perspectives is critical when you are combating any cognitive bias--and why I am always rolling my opinions over in my head again and again.

When we don't confront our recency bias, we ignore historical patterns and fail to learn. Our brains are lazy. They want to do the least amount of work for the most amount of reward. The problem, unfortunately, arises when our shortcut-taking leads to worse outcomes that we have a disproportionate experience with so we don't actually learn anything from the events leading to those worse outcomes.

In other words, history majors get mad because nothing is new and we are always repeating a cycle we never learn from.

That's all well and good, but what does that have to do with books?

Easy. In the book space, we tend to misguidedly feel like whatever books are recently out or new to the market are the "best book", forgetting all of the other historically "best books" we have read. We start to crave newness--new titles, new authors, new installments, new series--more than we crave high quality. Our recency bias in books means the zeitgeist is so rapid-moving that if a new author wants to capture the conversation, there is a large amount of pressure for them to write and produce a book or series too fast in order to stay relevant to the conversation.

Our addiction to newness can be fine when talking about things like clothing, hairstyles, movies, etc., but books are different. Books require time. Slowness. Consideration. Deliberation. Authors aren't SHEIN factories. To manifest their stories and ideas on a page requires time, the nemesis of recency bias.

There are complaints in the book space about book quality significantly dropping off in books 2/3 of a series and many theories about why--I think all of them are correct, kind of like how there was no singular Fall of Rome event--but not many people are discussing the impact of recency bias on this conversation. When an author writes their first book, nobody knows who they are. They have as much time as they need to tell the story they want, so the first installment is strong and well rounded and well told.

Once it gets "discovered" and published, publishers want to keep that series or author in the zeitgeist as long as possible to make sales. Thus, the pressure is on to produce, produce, produce. Write, write, write. So a book that took 5 years to write now has to catapult a sequel into existence in a year--20% of the time it took to get the first part right. Without the other 80% of that time, we see a steep drop in quality, world building, consistency, etc. that ends up on social media with people very upset and annoyed that the second or third in a series isn't as good as the first.

So how do we fight back against this as readers?

Push back against publication timelines. Encourage authors to take their time. Be clear and adamant that we'd rather wait 4 years for the book an author deserves to write than 6 months for a slapdash story we are upset by. Be mindful of how you consume books. Dip into older series. Support authors who speak out against crunch timelines for books they're working on. Just be vocal about the fact that books, of all things, are patient and an author can and should take their time.

The book zeitgeist is going to swallow a new Robin Hobb or Margaret Atwood novel in just as many gulps in 7 years as they would in 7 months. That's the beauty of the book space people are forgetting--beloved authors don't fade into obscurity if they're not constantly churning out a new novel. Writing isn't content creation, it's storytelling. The oldest form of art and communication humanity has. Trying to push writers into treating their stories like content is going to erode the quality and sanctity of that craft, leading to weaker books and worse stories. Weaker books and worse stories will make people put down more books and eventually step away from reading altogether. That's bad for... well, everyone.

Recency bias also has this horrible habit of skewing how it is we "rate" books. This means it's impacting reviewers and content creators negatively with our audiences if we don't watch out for it. It's insidious and frustrating. Every single book pops up on creators' pages as "the best book they've ever read". If every book is the best book, then none of them are the best book. It creates mistrust between reviewers and our audiences when we continually say everything we just read is the best thing we just read.

As reviewers, it's important for us to use discernment. We have platforms, therefore we have a responsibility to those platforms. This means being mindful of our cognitive biases, how we speak about the books we read, and how honestly we engage with the material we are reading. I, personally, can find something to love about everything I read--even if I didn't love it. It's important to note the good parts of something, but also the parts that didn't land. I have to remind myself that though I've found something important to love about a book everyone else disliked, I need to keep in mind the parts that were weak as well and speak to those against my strong desire to be enthusiastic and supportive.

It's a hard line to walk. Especially when we read and ARC or new release and want to be so excited and joyful about that with people. We still have that obligation to our audiences to go inward and as ourselves: did I love this new book or is it just... new. Or my personal favorite: is this the best book in the series or just the one that I recently read?

If you step into the content creation sphere, specifically around books, there's an obligation that is unspoken to be mindful, honest, direct, nonjudgmental, and discerning. It is on us to ensure we are not letting recency bias affect our experiences with a book and calling everything we read our "favorite book". How do we fight that? I'm so glad you asked.

Be mindful, be stingy, be self-honest, and be inquisitive about our own opinions! Read across timelines. Older books, newer books, recent books, less recent books. Reading across decades and being intentional about rotating in older books and things that aren't brand new and shiny helps us remember how much is out there and what it means for a book to truly be a favorite. Question yourself every time you finish a book and feel an immediate urge to gush about it. Why did you love it? What stuck out the most? How has that book affected you? Why is it 5-stars? Why is it your favorite?

For anyone just reading for love of the game and not doing any kind of reviews or creation or anything so grave and serious as recording BookTok videos, do whatever you want and love whatever you want! But if you're going to choose to step seriously into an arena where people will look to you for recommendations, ideas, things to bury their heads in, it changes the calculus on how we read and how we speak about the books we get through. A platform where we will be listened to requires a different degree of responsibility. It requires us to engage actively with our own thoughts and opinions so we can articulate and justify them in a way that lets people make decisions that are informed and honest.

If we want to save the creator space from just labeling every new book as "6 stars" and prevent our books we love from becoming a content creation pit of disappointment, we have to face down our silent enemy slithering around in the battlefield of our brains:

Recency bias.