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Recall bias 0:51

A 51-second explainer of Recall bias, narrated over the same demo you can try yourself.

The Recall bias explainer. Prefer to do it yourself? Try the interactive demo.

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What this video covers

Recall bias is the gap between what people remember doing and what they actually did. Human memory isn't a recording; it's a reconstruction - lossy, smoothed, and skewed toward the vivid, the recent and the emotional. So any research that asks people to remember their past behaviour collects an edited highlights reel, not an accurate log.

Ask them and it's "a couple of times a week, when I need it." Check the logs and it's thirty-odd quick opens, mostly out of habit. Nobody's lying - their memory just kept the deliberate moments and quietly dropped the routine ones. That gap between remembered and actual behaviour is recall bias, and it's why "how often do you…?" answers can't be trusted.

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