Who is the GOAT in sports? Imagine you asked this question and got an answer; what is the expected response? Notice that we are only interested in those who responded; a fair proportion of humans may not care much about the question. Therefore, positive responses have an inherent survivorship bias in them!
There is a strong possibility that you get Lionel Messi as the answer. There is also a, albeit smaller, chance that you obtain LeBron James. To a certain degree, both are on top of their respective fields – LeBron in Basketball in the US, Messi in Football in the rest of the world! Partly also due to LeBron getting the all-time scoring record in the NBA earlier this month (February 2023) and Messi’s recent victory in the world cup (December 2022). The last statement reflects a combination of recency bias (both events happened recently and are fresh in the memory) and availability bias (can’t blame an American for not knowing Messi as much).
Taking a step further, if you get an answer and the person is in the 40-50 age bracket, there is a chance that the answer is Michael Jordan in the US or Diego Maradona for the rest. Here, it is unlikely the recency, but the availability bias. That connects to what the person could recall from the 1980s and 90s.
Sports historians, on the other hand, may have other candidates, the names the general public may choose to ignore. It could be Muhammad Ali due to his undeniable stature as a heavyweight boxer, social activist and pop culture icon. It could be Pele, Jesse Owens or Serena Williams, all of them had odds-defeating stories to reach their greatness.
A goat is just an animal
You may recognise the recency bias as a subset of the availability bias. The latter describes someone making a choice based on immediate examples that come to mind, which can very well be information acquired recently.
Finally, the GOAT debate is only relevant to those who follow sports with some passion. For the majority of humans on this planet, the phrase “the greatest of all time” may not even exist, or if it exists, it could well be Gandhi, Mandela, King or someone else that touched their lives.
References
The availability heuristic: Wiki
The recency bias: Wiki
Recency bias in trading: Youtube
