Speaker 1: The winner of the Eurovision Song Contest is Sweden.
Katy Milkman: You might think that popular TV talent shows are all about celebrating the best performer—the most talented or the most original or the most artistic. But in a now-classic paper from 2005 called "Save the Last Dance for Me" by Wändi Bruine de Bruin, a surprising effect turned up. She showed that the musical artists who performed later in the Eurovision Song Contest generally received more points or higher ratings than those who performed early in the competition.
Speaker 1: The public has given you 243 points. We have a winner.
Katy Milkman: This was true even though the order of musical acts was determined randomly, and even though all performers had a chance to shine before the final votes were counted. Why did it help performers to have a later slot in the lineup? In this episode, we'll examine this peculiar effect of timing. It's a phenomenon that can influence decisions on the concert stage, in the delivery room, and at the ballot box.
Richard Nixon: Having lost a close one eight years ago and having won a close one this year, I can say this: 'Winning's a lot more fun.
Katy Milkman: I'm Dr. Katy Milkman, and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you true stories about high-stakes choices, and then we examine how these stories connect to the latest research in behavioral science. We do it all to help you make better judgements and avoid costly mistakes.
Speaker 4: The New Hampshire Republican Presidential Primary is the start of the 1968 campaign trail.
Richard Nixon: I will test my ability to win, and my ability to cope with the issues, in the fires of the primary.
Hubert Humphrey: I choose not simply to run for president. I seek to lead a great nation.
John Farrell: It was a huge year in American history.
Katy Milkman: This is John.
John Farrell: Hi, I'm John Farrell, and I'm a historian.
Katy Milkman: John is a celebrated political biographer, and we've invited him on the show in this 2024 election year to talk about a dramatic presidential contest from another century, the 1968 race for the White House.
Hubert Humphrey: I am announcing today my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.
Richard Nixon: I have criticized the military conduct for the war. I think we've wasted our military …
Hubert Humphrey: The disenchantment with our society, the divisions, whether it's between Blacks and whites, between the poor …
Speaker 7: Vietnam was a very perplexing and troublesome problem for the American people.
Hubert Humphrey: "Let me be free," say the people.
Katy Milkman: The year leading up to that election was full of tumultuous and tragic events that would dramatically affect the political climate.
John Farrell: There was a Vietcong offensive in South Vietnam.
Speaker 8: Launched a savage attack on Saigon.
John Farrell: It created huge doubts in the American public about whether or not the war could be won. That was followed up by presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, senator from Minnesota, challenging Lyndon Johnson and coming very close to beating him in the New Hampshire primary. That brought Senator Robert F. Kennedy into the race.
Speaker 9: The senator is doing so in the face of almost solid opposition from the …
John Farrell: In turn, three more dominoes fell, and Lyndon Johnson made a speech and announced that he was not going to run for re-election. And within weeks, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.
Speaker 10: Just at 8:00 this morning, Dr. Martin Luther King's body was brought to lie in state for an hour.
John Farrell: A few more weeks passed, and Robert Kennedy was assassinated in California.
Speaker 11: The suspect now identified as Sirhan Sirhan was grabbed by Rafer Johnson and Rosey Grier …
John Farrell: And it looked like the Democratic nomination was going to be won by Hubert Humphrey, who was Lyndon Johnson's vice president.
Hubert Humphrey: I am ready to lead our country.
Katy Milkman: The 1968 Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago. Unfortunately for Hubert Humphrey, anti-war forces in the city battled with Chicago police. The protests and violence overshadowed his nomination and gave the impression that the party was out of control.
Speaker 12: Mr. Chairman, most delegates to this convention do not know that thousands of young people are being beaten. We want to relocate this convention in another city.
Speaker 13: Wyoming, we're balloting on candidates for the president of the United States.
John Farrell: Richard Nixon, meanwhile, had captured the Republican nomination.
Richard Nixon: Eight years ago, I had the highest honor of accepting your nomination for president of the United States.
John Farrell: And in a beautiful acceptance speech and a wonderfully choreographed convention …
Richard Nixon: Tonight, I again proudly accept that nomination for president of the United States.
John Farrell: … zoomed out to a huge lead that at one point was Nixon 45% and Hubert Humphrey 29%.
Richard Nixon: But I have news for you. This time there's a difference. This time, we're going to win.
John Farrell: And so it looked very much like a Nixon landslide as the two campaigns entered September in the traditional starting point at Labor Day.
Katy Milkman: At the beginning of the race, it was Nixon's to lose, but his advantage would start to fade, at least according to national polls.
John Farrell: The polling that we have shows that, as reporters in New York magazine wrote, the Nixon campaign was "a model of studied vagueness" and that people like Pat Buchanan, Nixon's fiery aide, was sending him memos saying, "We can't coast on this lead because we will lose it." But Nixon basically gave a very low-key performance throughout September hoping just to coast on that lead. And in a series of moves, the Democrats began to catch up. Humphrey began to slowly climb back towards Nixon. The question was whether Humphrey could be pumped up enough by some combination of events that would push him ahead of Nixon during October.
Katy Milkman: The war in Vietnam had been dragging on for years, but in the summer of 1968, a sliver of hope appeared in the geopolitical quagmire.
John Farrell: The Soviet Union begins to send signals to Lyndon Johnson that if the United States was to make a significant concession like a bombing halt over all of North Vietnam that there could be progress, real progress, in the peace talks that were ongoing in Paris. And there were even some signs from the North Vietnamese representatives who were talking with the American representatives in Paris that good things could happen if there was a country-wide bombing halt, an appeal for peace.
Katy Milkman: A move towards peace in Vietnam would be a significant political victory for President Lyndon Johnson. And by extension for presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey.
John Farrell: There was genuine hope in the Johnson White House that this was a significant breakthrough. At the same time, being a wily old politician, Lyndon Johnson knew that this would help Hubert Humphrey and would be examined by the nation's press as a cynical move. So Johnson was aware that this announcement coming so close to the November 5th election could be seen as a cynical ploy. And so he tried very hard to make sure that he had his ducks all in a row.
Katy Milkman: Johnson had his military commanders in Vietnam flown to Washington so he could brief them in advance. He also spoke with President Thiệu of South Vietnam and believed Thiệu was on board with the plan.
John Farrell: The announcement was made on the night of October 31st, six days before the election.
Lyndon Johnson: I have now ordered that all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam cease as of 8 a.m., Washington time.
Katy Milkman: This late-breaking positive news seemed to have an effect on the presidential race. Polling data suggested it was shifting opinion as hoped.
John Farrell: By the weekend, one poll shows Humphrey inching ahead. You see some signs of reserve in the press about whether or not this was a contrived trick by Lyndon Johnson or whether it was something that might actually happen. Now, in the midst of all this, Richard Nixon is suspicious, and he gets messages from inside the Johnson White House and from inside the peace contingent that's talking in Paris that Johnson is planning something, he's planning a bombing halt. And because these messages are coming from people who are sympathetic to Nixon and wanting to be the cat that brings the mouse to the door, they're egging him on, and they're saying there's no hope of a real settlement. This is just a crude, cynical move by Johnson to push Humphrey over the top. And this begins to get Nixon incredibly agitated, and he begins to take measures of his own to send signals to South Vietnam that they will get a better deal if they wait and hold out until Nixon is elected. And indeed, President Thiệu surprises, stuns, I believe the Sunday before the election, he announces that South Vietnam will not participate in the talks.
Katy Milkman: This was a huge development in the course of the war and in the trajectory of the race for the White House. A momentous event close to a presidential election has come to be known as an October surprise. Lyndon Johnson's announcement of the peace talks could be considered an October surprise in Hubert Humphrey's favor, and the scuttling of those same peace talks, thanks to Richard Nixon's posturing, was another October surprise, one that very much played to Nixon's advantage, harming Hubert Humphrey.
John Farrell: Nixon very deftly appears on Meet the Press and furthers the suspicious feeling around the country that this is all just a cynical political ploy, and Humphrey's momentum on at least that issue slows in those 48, 72 hours before the election.
Katy Milkman: Lyndon Johnson's October surprise announcement of potential peace talks in Vietnam had a clear impact on polling. Vice President Hubert Humphrey's standing among potential voters improved. It's not quite as clear that Richard Nixon's October surprise counterattack had an equal effect, but it seems that his framing of the peace talks as a ploy and his influence on Vietnamese President Thiệu's decision not to participate, might've helped Nixon inch across the finish line as the winner of one of the closest presidential elections in American history.
Richard Nixon: President Johnson, Vice President Humphrey, my fellow Americans, and my fellow citizens of the world community, I ask you to share with me today the majesty of this moment.
Hubert Humphrey: I never had any doubt whether it would be a close fight. We've got a president-elect; he's going to have my help.
Katy Milkman: So why did this all matter so much to voters? For one thing, the American electorate was deeply affected by the war. People were worried.
John Farrell: You're worried about Vietnam. 'You're worried about whether or not your son-in-law, your daughter's fiancé, is going to be able to finish the four years at college, or whether he's going to go over to Vietnam and be killed in a war that seems to be mired in a stalemate and everybody's telling you now is unwinnable.
Katy Milkman: But voters had been worried about the war for a long time. That issue didn't just take center stage in the final days of the election. Arguably, though, the fact that the announcement of peace talks happened right before the election meant that it was top of mind for voters as they got ready to cast their ballots.
John Farrell: All of a sudden, the president comes on television five days before the election and says, "The North Vietnamese have agreed to talks, and in order to further that talks, I'm going to stop the bombing where we're bombing in North Vietnam." And you can't not feel better about the prospects for peace as you turn towards making your final decision that weekend, and you're making that final decision, and all of a sudden there's this counterargument being made that "Wait a minute, South Vietnam doesn't know what Lyndon Johnson is talking about. He's trying to pull the wool over your eyes one more time and push his buddy over the finish line."
And given all that happened that year, all the challenges to American values and the cynicism that exists in the body politic already about whether Lyndon Johnson had been credible about the war, that all of a sudden this comes back again in a last second wave, and you say, "Ah, we've heard this before. This is riverboat Lyndon exaggerating a minor development and then getting egg in his face because he didn't have his ducks in a row," to throw a whole bunch of metaphors together.
So now you're in there in the voting booth, you've got Richard Nixon, who seems maybe even a victim of this last weekend, but you know is a stolid Republican, seems to share your values, and you've got Hubert Humphrey, whose party doesn't know what they stand for, and now at the last minute they're pulling these tricks about Vietnam—I'm going to close my eyes and vote for Nixon. So that's my tortured feeling as to how I think those last few days proceeded. If President Thiệu had stood up before the South Vietnamese assembly on Saturday or Sunday and said, "This is great news. Here's my team. We're going to go to Paris and face down the North Vietnamese," I think that, given the closeness of the election, things might've been different than what happened. The October surprises, and they come in two forms: One is a natural event that happens without the control of either of the candidates. The more sinister October surprise is something that's a contrived event involving backroom intrigue. It's not a rare phenomenon. If you count both the kinds that are accidental and contrived, it happens a lot.
Katy Milkman: The October surprises of 1968 were clearly not the first of their kind and definitely not the last.
John Farrell: Going all the way back to 1800 to show that this is not some recent development in American politics, Alexander Hamilton in October of 1800 came out unexpectedly with a blistering attack on John Adams of his own party and helped propel Thomas Jefferson into the White House.
Katy Milkman: While politicians can't control every event that may affect the late stages of a campaign, they're well aware of the potential power of the late-breaking events that they can control.
John Farrell: If the October surprises didn't have an influential impact, then the campaigns wouldn't try them. But for better or worse, they perceive them as having clout, as having an effect, particularly very close to the election before there's a chance for reality to set in.
Katy Milkman: John Farrell is a biographer and historian and the bestselling author of Richard Nixon: The Life. His latest book is Ted Kennedy: A Life. You can find links in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.
It probably comes as no surprise that October surprises are so influential in the political world. There's something intuitive about last-minute bombshell news affecting political fortunes, but elections are often filled with unexpected events, and surprising revelations drop at various points throughout the course of most campaigns. So why is it that late-breaking news seems to have an outsized influence on voter behavior? Or as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, why would the order in which musical acts appear in a TV talent contest affect who has a best chance at winning? The answer boils down to something behavioral scientists call recency bias, and it's a topic that my next guest has studied in a medical context.
Manasvini Singh is an assistant professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on topics at the intersection between decision theory and health policy. Hi, Vini, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.
Manasvini Singh: Hi. Thanks, Katy. I'm so excited to be on this podcast.
Katy Milkman: Well, I'm thrilled that you're here and I am excited to talk about recency bias. I was hoping we could start with you just defining recency bias. What is it exactly?
Manasvini Singh: Of course. When we are exhibiting recency bias, we are making decisions that overweight things that happened closer to us in time, that just happened, for instance, as opposed to things that happened long ago, even though how close it is in time to us shouldn't really matter.
Katy Milkman: So when I think of recency, I think of something like a friend asks me for a restaurant recommendation, what's a great restaurant? And instead of thinking of the best restaurant in Philadelphia, I mention the place I went last week because it's what comes to mind? Do you agree that that's an example?
Manasvini Singh: Exactly right. My go-to example is I almost get into a car crash, and then I am a little bit more careful the next day, a little less careful the day after, and by the third day, I'm basically back to normal.
Katy Milkman: Oh, I love that example. OK, so you're very nervous after this bad event and take extra care. So it can affect good or bad.
Manasvini Singh: Exactly right.
Katy Milkman: Well, you have this absolutely fascinating paper that looks at a heuristic that seems to affect the decisions doctors make about how to treat their patients. And I interpret it as a great example of recency bias, and I was hoping you could describe that work to us.
Manasvini Singh: Of course, yeah. So in this paper I look at whether physicians, specifically obstetricians, overreact to recent negative patient outcomes. So in the delivery room or in the labor delivery setting, I look at—if you have physician Dr. Mary, for example—Dr. Mary is going about her day, and then she performs a vaginal delivery, and there is a bad patient outcome in that delivery. Does she on the next patient, is she more likely to perform a cesarean on patient 2 because patient 1's vaginal delivery had a complication? So I look at whether that happens, and I actually show that it happens in both directions. So patient 1's complication in a vaginal delivery makes it more likely that that physician switches to a cesarean on the next patient. And if there's a complication in patient 1's cesarean, they're more likely to switch to a vaginal on the next patient as well.
Katy Milkman: Got it. So any time you have two patients, you define them as patient 1 and patient 2. And whatever delivery mode patient 1 has, if it doesn't go well, there's going to be a higher probability of a switch on patient 2. So whether patient 1 is cesarean or vaginal delivery, if it doesn't go well, the next patient gets the opposite kind of treatment with a higher probability.
Manasvini Singh: Exactly. And I just want to be careful that I'm not saying that it's conscious. For instance, it's not like the physician is like, "Oh, now I have to switch to this other delivery mode." If you think of the physician's threshold for performing cesarean, maybe the threshold is lowered, and they're more likely to do a cesarean on the next patient, or now it's higher, so they might be more reluctant to do a cesarean in the next patient.
Katy Milkman: Yeah, that makes total sense. And going back to the example we were talking about at the beginning. If you have a near miss or an accident when you're driving, now it's going to be very top of mind for you that I want to be careful and avoid a bad outcome when I'm driving again. So that's one example of maybe recency. And this seems like another where you're a doctor, you're trying to do the right thing for every patient, and you have some implicit probability that it's delivery type 1 or 2, and you're never totally sure, but after a bad event, you become a little more gun-shy of the type of delivery mode you just used. Am I thinking about that correctly?
Manasvini Singh: Exactly right. And I think the medical setting is especially where such biases are likely to flourish because there's so much uncertainty around, even if you just take the obstetric setting, there's no hard-and-fast clinical guidelines where the physician is told that on patient type A, you need to do a cesarean, and on patient type B, you need to do a vaginal. So when there's uncertainty, there's this greater likelihood relying on these sort of biases for instance.
Katy Milkman: That's really interesting. What do we know about why recency bias arises? What does the literature say about what's causing this at a deep level, why we would swing back and forth as opposed to acting a little bit like a statistical reasoner who's very logical?
Manasvini Singh: To begin with, there seems to be some sort of biological basis to this type of learning. There's evidence in how bees make formations and ants and foraging behaviors amongst rats and also how children learn language, this sort of incorporating the outcome of the last decision into your current decision, what I call "win, stay; lose, shift," which is maybe a super set of the recency behaviors that we're talking of. So there does seem to be some sort of biological underpinnings to this behavior that maybe on average in some situations are not particularly harmful or deleterious. This might be a good heuristic to get to the right decision, if that makes sense.
Katy Milkman: It's some sort of search pattern that we're biologically programmed to have to find the optimum.
Manasvini Singh: Yeah, and maybe in simpler environments, relying on your last decision is a good signal of the optimality of your next decision.
Katy Milkman: In settings where things are changing a lot, it seems like that would be really smart if you're in a new environment, and you're trying to search for the right pattern to stick to. Could you talk a little bit more about how you are able to determine that it's suboptimal for these obstetricians to behave in the way that you're detecting?
Manasvini Singh: That is a very important question because that differentiates learning from a bias, and it's very, very hard to differentiate the two, especially because a lot of times we don't know what priors they're starting from. What is the signal of a complication in a cesarean? So the way I try to get at it, and maybe it's imperfect, but it does allow us some insight, is one, I show that the patient for whom the physician used this heuristic has worse health outcomes. The mother and child have a slightly higher likelihood of dying if they follow a prior complication, and then there is a switch performed on them.
Katy Milkman: And this is using massive amounts of data from multiple hospital systems that you're able to see these patterns over, was it decades? Am I remembering correctly?
Manasvini Singh: I think 20 years, two hospitals, because I needed electronic medical record data. And so that's one of the ways that I hint or provide some evidence that it probably isn't doing a whole lot of good. And then the other things that make it inconsistent with learning is that experienced physicians are more likely to use this heuristic, which goes in the face of the most basic learning models and that the physicians who use this more often are more likely to have bad outcomes over time.
Katy Milkman: All really fascinating. So we've been talking a lot about this in the context of medical decision-making for the obvious reason that that's where you've studied it, and it's also a super important setting, and all of us have interactions with doctors, but when you think more globally about recency bias, are there some settings besides hospitals and doctor's visits where you think we should all be conscious that recency bias could contort our judgments?
Manasvini Singh: Given that we are always on social media and the amount of information we get from the world is so much, it's a fire hose often at times, it feels like at least, and so much of it is negative. I wonder how much of our day-to-day decisions, how much of the decisions made by the politicians that represent us, and how much of just general policymaking is based on the information that we got recently, which may look more negative than things really are. I worry about how the informational environment that we live in may exacerbate the effect of recency bias in ways that affect very important factors, such as our democracies and our rights and how we interact with each other in a society. So I think, yeah, I worry about the informational settings that we are in now.
Katy Milkman: All right, one last question. If you could give our listeners one piece of advice about how they can improve their everyday decisions and avoid recency bias now that they're aware of it, what would you suggest they think about differently or do differently potentially?
Manasvini Singh: When making decisions based on information that happened very recently, maybe pause for a second and try to prime yourself with a different scenario that has also happened to you in the past so you can maybe take a more holistic view of the decision that you're making currently. Make other things more recent. Even though they might not be recent in time, they will always be readily accessible in your memory. So maybe make some things recent that aren't recent in time, if that makes sense. You are going up to take a big exam, and you didn't perform that well on your last one. Maybe you're nervous, and you're overweighting that past exam, but just remember that in your life you have done well several times, and you are doing better than you think you are. And maybe that will boost your confidence and make you do better on this test.
Katy Milkman: I like that. That's a really nice place to end, and I so appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today about recency bias and your amazing research. So thank you, Vini, for spending time with me and with the listeners to Choiceology.
Manasvini Singh: Thanks so much, Katy. I really enjoyed talking with you.
Katy Milkman: Manasvini Singh is an assistant professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. She's a behavioral economist who studies topics at the intersection between decision theory and health policy. You can find links to her website and to her Science paper "Heuristics in the Delivery Room" in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.
It's easy to overfocus on the most recent market news or to think that current economic trends will simply continue, which is why recency bias too often affects investing decisions. Schwab's newest podcast, On Investing, looks beyond the hype and the headlines to help you understand what's really happening in the stock and bond markets and the macroeconomy and to understand what the implications might be for your portfolio. Check it out at schwab.com/OnInvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.
Our tendency to overweight recent events when judging the future is one of several common errors we make that fall under an umbrella category of mistakes, all of which are driven by what's called the availability heuristic. The basic idea has to do with how we assess likelihoods, say, the likelihood that we'll get into a car crash today, or that the C-section delivery we're about to attempt will go awry, or that the politician we're about to vote for will turn out to be OK. When we make these kinds of assessments, we have to use whatever information we can call to mind, the information that's available to us. And it turns out some information is more readily available or easy to call to mind than other information. We tend to place too much weight on that type of information when forming judgments, information that's memorable because it, say, just happened, or information that's memorable because people have been talking about it a lot, or information that's memorable because we have a really graphic image in mind that reinforces it.
But information that's repeated a lot is also easier to call to mind. And so the illusory truth effect, which we covered in our last episode, is a cousin of recency bias. Another cousin is vividness bias. Vivid information is easier to recall than other information, and this was the topic of a very early Choiceology episode. Among other things, vividness bias helps explain why so many people are terrified of sharks even though they're only responsible for a handful of human deaths each year. Snails are many orders of magnitude more deadly, FYI.
So what can you do about this class of biases? Your best weapon against all mistakes driven by the availability heuristic is research. Whenever you're making a decision that's important, an appreciation that your memory is a biased recorder of information should drive you to track down the facts. Yes, maybe your neighbor just had a pipe burst in their kitchen. Maybe that caused lots of expensive damage, but does that mean you need to worry about your flood insurance? Do you know anyone else who experienced a major home flood last year? How common is this really? When you care about a decision, ask yourself if you might be reacting too strongly to recent information instead of the big picture, and then do your homework so you can make the smarter choice.
You've been listening to Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. If you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify or feedback wherever you listen. You can also follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app. And if you want more of the kinds of insights we bring you on Choiceology about how to improve your decisions, you can order my book, How to Change, or sign up for monthly newsletter, Milkman Delivers on Substack. Next time, a story about how culture can affect success in the high-stakes world of fine dining. I'm Dr. Katy Milkman. Talk to you soon.
SPEAKER 16: For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com/podcast.
