HN Community is not immune to Recency Bias

3 points

17 years ago

Inspired by links provided by users in "Best HN Thread of 2008" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417782 I tested out how recent the "favourite" threads of HN Community are, here are the results:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pN6XUWPVqqcQNQNdmpZtVVg&oid=2&output=image

Apart from the fact that I have got too much time on my hands, it also proves that hackers also not immune to cognitive biases that "normal people" are prone to.

Now some disclaimers: 1) Based on the links in the threads as on 3rd Jan, 13:30 GMT 2) Links by some individual users were uniformly spread over the year but collectively it can be seen that it is not the case.

Some arguments against my hypothesis, 1) The test would be itself biased if not quite a lot of commentators joined HN before Jan 1 2008. 2) Same goes if increasingly more stories are being published per day since the start.

More info on recency bias: http://knol.google.com/k/hardik-thakkar/recency-bias/2l6p0gc69rsej/1#

If anyone is curious enough, send me a msg with you email address and I will share the spreadsheet (its on googledocs)

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