What is recent events bias?

Recent events bias is a concept in personal epistemology: Recent events disproportionately influence your perception of what is normal or likely.

Example: Your company had two bad quarters after twelve good ones. In the leadership meeting, the team debates whether to abandon the current strategy — as though fourteen quarters of evidence no longer matter because the last sixty days felt painful. Nobody references the full dataset. The most recent experience has silently overwritten their calibration of what is normal.

This concept is part of Phase 8 (Perceptual Calibration) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for perceptual calibration.