Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We examine a “mere newness bias,” a preference for novelty purely due to recentness of release. In a series of studies, we show that, for newer and older products of identical quality, people prefer newly released goods over older goods across a range of domains. This bias translates to a higher willing to pay, greater anticipated excitement, and higher likelihood of purchase for products perceived to be newer. The mere newness bias persists even for die rolls, where there cannot be any difference in quality and where there is no social benefit to newness.