Recency Bias

A cognitive bias where recent events are weighted more heavily than earlier ones when making evaluations. In performance reviews, recency bias causes managers to base ratings primarily on the last 2-4 weeks rather than the full review period—resulting in inaccurate assessments that miss sustained contributions and penalize employees whose strongest work happened months ago. AI agents counter recency bias by tracking achievements throughout the review period and surfacing a balanced, time-distributed evidence set.