You have seen it before, in a different context. The memory attached to the earlier pairing is now attaching to this new one.
Neomania is a cognitive bias whereby people overvalue newness and undervalue the proven utility of older things.
A Scene Worth Recognising
During a quarterly planning meeting, the team insists on replacing the longâstanding projectâtracking spreadsheet with a brandânew AIâdriven platform that promises realâtime insights. They overlook that the spreadsheet has reliably captured milestones, budgets, and risks for years with minimal training. The new tool requires extensive setup, frequent updates, and a steep learning curve, causing delays and frustration. By focusing on the novelty of the AI solution, they undervalue the proven stability and low cost of the existing system, leading to wasted effort and missed deadlines.
What it means and how it works
Neomania operates through a novelty heuristic: the mind uses recency and unfamiliarity as quick cues for value, often amplified by media hype and social comparison. When encountering something new, the brain assigns it a provisional positive weight, while older items are processed as familiar and thus less salient, leading to an undervaluation of their proven durability and utility.
In Rolf Dobelli's book The Art of Thinking Clearly (Chapter 69), neomania is described as a tendency to assume that novel technologies, products, or ideas will be superior and longâlasting, while disregarding items that have endured for centuries or millennia. This bias leads individuals to imagine futures filled with radical inventions (e.g., flying cars, jet packs, pillâbased nutrition) and to overlook the continued relevance of simple, timeâtested objects such as chairs, forks, pants, and wooden bookshelves. The bias is reinforced by cultural narratives that equate novelty with progress and by a heuristic that treats 'new' as a proxy for 'better'.
Why it matters
The bias influences consumer spending, investment decisions, and policy priorities, causing resources to flow toward flashy but untested innovations while neglecting robust, lowâtech solutions that may offer greater longâterm benefit. Recognizing neomania helps individuals and organizations make more balanced choices, avoid wasteful upgrades, and appreciate the resilience of enduring technologies.
The verified research on this pattern supports the following:
- Neomania leads individuals to overestimate the future impact of novel technologies while underestimating the continued utility of established technologies.
- Exposure to novelty triggers a positive affective response that can bias judgment toward adopting new products.
- Neomania is a cognitive bias where individuals favor novel items over older, proven ones.
Common misunderstandings
Misunderstanding 1: Neomania simply means liking new things; it is not a bias.
Misunderstanding 2: If something is new, it is always better than older alternatives.
Misunderstanding 3: Old technologies are inherently inferior and should be replaced.
See Neomania in everyday decisions
Pick a life context to see how this bias can show up outside the textbook.
Why I Keep Abandoning Habit Apps After a Week
Why do I keep abandoning habit apps after a week? Mia switches from a trusted paper log to a new habit-tracking app that offers a real-time mood-correlation graph, only to feel swamped by alerts and lose the steady routine that once worked.
Scenario
Mia keeps a small notebook where she writes down her water intake (aiming for eight glasses) and her bedtime (usually 10:30 pm). The notebook has been with her for months, needing only a pen and a quiet moment. One evening she sees a sponsored post in her feed for a new habit-tracking app that promises a real-time mood-correlation graph. Excited by the novelty, she downloads the app, spends twenty minutes creating a profile, linking her calendar, and picking an avatar. The app immediately starts sending push notifications. At 9:00 am it shows: 'Log your water now!' with a badge that reads '2-day streak'. At 10:15 am another alert appears: 'Your mood is low today, try a breathing exercise.' Mia checks the app, taps the suggestion, and misses writing her notebook entry at 10:30 pm because she is responding to the alert. After a week she feels distracted by the constant pings, skips entries, feels overwhelmed by the data, and returns to her notebook, realizing the simple habit had given her the consistency she needed without the extra noise.
Where The Bias Enters
The novelty heuristic makes the fresh app feel valuable despite its untested cost, while the familiar notebook feels ordinary and is undervalued.
Decision Check
1) Does the new tool solve a problem the notebook doesn't? 2) Will the extra steps save time or add friction? 3) Have I used a similar tool before and abandoned it?
This pilot example is illustrative and review-gated. It is designed to explain the pattern, not to claim a documented public case.
Sources
- Niroula, Rishab. REV 2.0 Topic Catalog. Hello to Halo.
- Cialdini, Robert B. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Harper Business, 2006.
- Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
The next time this pattern surfaces, the move is not to fight it â it is to notice it. Naming Neomania creates a moment of pause before the decision. That moment is usually enough.