Baader-Meinhof phenomenon

Selective and Confirmation bias

Often we hear about some new topic, or fancy word and suddenly you start seeing it everywhere. We start questioning, was this thing always there or something strange is happening. It's not only with regular english word, but it can be with newly learned food item, some place to visit or vacation, or TV show or stock ticker, clothes brands.

After learning the new word, even though you have never heard before, it suddenly start popping up everywhere. why? The answer is science. It's your brain which is doing the trick on you. Your mind creates specific type of cognitive bias "frequency illusion". It start deviating from normal, rational thought and starts to making up patterns from different reading or conversations. When we think about it in future and try to connect dots, it always feels like it fits like puzzle pieces, it was bound to happen and it feels like we knew how it was suppose to go. Frequency Illusion was used by Arnold Zwicky, a linguist from Stanford explained it few years back that its two different process happening at the same time - selective attention and confirmation bias.

Selective attention - it comes when we learn something new, its super fresh in our mind and we are by default paying more attention and thats why we see it more often in our daily interactions. Confirmation Bias - the above phenomenon is catalyzed by confirmation bias, which makes us search for what we already know and we start interpreting information as we consume that confirms our existing preconceptions - as we call it confirmation bias. We already know something and we try to come to the same conclusion even with different inputs. (whole new different topic, but thats same thing happen with our perception of news media outlet who gives news about something and we take side like right wing, left wing and social media feeds, youtube recommendation are likely work around somewhat similar manner.)

Like our brain trying to learn new information as we have just started some journey on learning something, and as we see the same information at different place and fool ourself by explaining - "ohh wow, I just learned about it and now I am seeing it at more places, it must be a legit thing or next big thing." Like we pass by some restaurant and we are thinking to visit it and it just happen that friend of ours suggest that we should try food there, we build up the case that it has to be good, (though anyway we had made up mind that we want to visit that place before even friend suggested.) Actually we are trying to make fit the information into some rational system. Its applicable at many places, below are some examples -

• Making some purchase of new product

• when trying to get admission at college or selecting subject (we have already made up mind, all we are doing is trying to justify our own judgment)

• on learning about new person on social media to follow

• our political affiliation

So in summary, you actually learn something knew, and believe that there is some crazy pattern by which your brain is processing information and trying to make sense the recurrent appearances, it’s all just made up.

as per Pacific Standard, Badder-Meinhof phenomenon was invented in 1994 by St. Paul Pioneer Press' online discussion board, who came up with after hearing he name of ultra-left-wing German terrorist group twice in 24 hours. he phrase became a meme on the newspaper's boards, where it still pops up regularly, and has since spread to the wider internet.

another interesting post on it.

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash