Ideas · · 7 min read
Baader-Meinhof and Friends
My absolute favourite oddity of language and psychology is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon - you learn a word and suddenly you hear it everywhere.
Photograph © Ken Reid
Baader-Meinhof and Friends
You learn a new word, let's say "defenestration" (an excellent word, by the way), having somehow escaped learning it for decades. Then within 48 hours you hear it on a podcast, spot it in a novel, and a colleague uses it in a meeting. Well, let's hope a colleague doesn't need to use it in a meeting.
That's the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also called the frequency illusion, and it's one of my favourite psychological concepts. It's one of many biases our brains come with, and this post is part of my series on, well, biases.
Quick jargon guide
- Defenestration: the act of throwing someone (or something) out of a window. Our example word.
- Mumpsimus: someone who sticks to a mistake after it's been pointed out, or the mistake itself.
- Baader-Meinhof phenomenon / frequency illusion: noticing a thing far more after you first notice it, and mistaking your new attention for a real increase in how often it occurs.
- Selective attention: the brain promoting the newly-relevant thing on its list of what to notice.
- Confirmation bias: each new sighting counts as evidence, and the thousands of non-sightings don't register at all.
- Recency / availability: judging how common something is by how easily examples come to mind, which favours the recent and the vivid over the actually-frequent.
- Apophenia: the broader tendency to see meaningful patterns in random noise.
- Clustering illusion: reading meaning into random clumps, when true randomness looks streaky, not evenly spread.
- Recency illusion: mistaking something you only just noticed for something newly arrived.
- Survivorship bias: judging from the winners in front of you while the losers, invisible, leave the sample.
- Gambler's fallacy / hot hand: expecting a random streak to reverse ("red is due") or to continue ("she's on fire"), when the odds never changed.
- Pareidolia: the face-detector firing on noise: faces in sockets, a man in the moon.
What's actually happening
The "frequency illusion" comes from Arnold Zwicky, a linguist at Stanford, who wrote about it on Language Log in 2005 and put it down to selective attention and confirmation bias working together. As soon as something matters to you, your brain adds it to the short list of stuff worth flagging, so you start catching the times it turns up that you'd have sailed past before. The word was always there, but it feels like it's popping up in your life like an etymologically inclined divine being's favourite hobby is improving your vocabulary.
The Baader-Meinhof name is older, and a lot weirder. In October 1994 the St. Paul Pioneer Press printed a letter in its Bulletin Board column from a reader who had been chatting to a friend about the Baader-Meinhof gang, years after they'd been in the news. The next day the friend phoned him about an article in that day's paper that mentioned the gang. The reader named the whole experience after them: the first time you learn a new word, you'll see it in print again within 24 hours. He also threw in (and I love this) a "Comics Page Corollary", that four or five times a year two comic strips will run the same punchline on the same day, and his example was Mother Goose & Grimm and Garfield both doing dogs drinking out of toilets. I bet you thought Baader and Meinhof were linguists, not a West German terrorist group!
The extended family
Here are some similar ones I've read about:
- The clustering illusion. Random data comes in clumps, and we read meaning into every clump. It's why "cancer clusters" so often turn out to be the statistics behaving normally, and why a shuffled playlist seems to "have favourites."
- The recency illusion. Zwicky named this one too: the conviction that something you just noticed must be new. Singular "they" gets called a modern invention, and it has been in regular use since the 14th century. "OMG" first turns up in a letter to Winston Churchill in 1917.
- Survivorship bias. Judging from the winners because the losers aren't around to be counted. "Old buildings were built better", no, the badly-built old ones fell down and aren't around to see.
- The gambler's fallacy and its twin, the hot hand. "Red is due" after a run of black; "she's on fire, pass her the ball." Each spin of the wheel is independent of the last one. The hot hand is messier, the research has gone back and forth and I'm not going to referee it, but where it's real it's small, and we treat both kinds of streak as signals anyway.
- Pareidolia. Faces in plug sockets, a man in the moon. We're so primed to spot faces that we find them in noise.
Why we're built this way
We naturally err towards seeing a pattern that isn't there, at least for the things above, and it's for good reason! An ancestor who heard a rustle in the grass, decided it was a tiger and ran wasted a bit of energy if it turned out to be the wind. One who missed a pattern that was there, and decided it was the wind when it was a tiger, got eaten. Natural selection only rewards surviving long enough to have children, and a jumpy, over-eager pattern detector does that better than a calibrated one that's right more often. Seeing "defenestration" everywhere for a week is a weird side effect of that. (Our preference for a good story over a true one probably comes from the same place.)
What to do about it
Well, not a lot, because it's just how our brains work. Knowing the names does not stop it. What does help is a few habits for catching it after your brain does it:
- Ask "where's the denominator?" Whenever a word you've just learned seems to be following you around, the missing number is how often it turned up before you were counting. Usually: the same.
- Count the misses, not just the hits. Nobody writes down the days a word didn't turn up, and those days are most of the data.
- Distrust vivid over frequent. If your sense of how common something is comes from how easily an example springs to mind, you're really measuring how memorable it is, and the news picks its stories for being memorable (e.g. we are great at remembering the car accident we got into, not the thousands of drives where nothing happened).
- Let randomness be lumpy. Streaks and clusters are what real randomness looks like, so a pattern in noise needs a lot more than "I noticed it" before I'd believe it.
The illusion will still get you the next time you buy a car, though: you'll spend a few weeks convinced that everyone else has bought the same one. Our primate brains are weird, aren't they?
Common questions
If knowing about biases doesn't fix them, what's the point?
It's interesting and you've learned something about your existence, which I think has a lot of merit. And the habits above help you catch it after the fact.
Aren't some patterns real, though?
Sure: the pattern detector is right often enough that we keep trusting it. But our subconscious "Hey, that's weird" is better for "Hey, that guy has been following me for 5 minutes" - definitely trust your gut there, but not for how often "mumpsimus" shows up in the book you're reading and on a podcast you listen to.
Is this why conspiracy theories are so sticky?
Partly. Apophenia supplies the "connections," confirmation bias keeps every hit and forgets every miss, and the frequency illusion makes the theme seem to be "everywhere once you look." None of that needs the believer to be stupid, just to have normal pattern-finding.
Does the name really come from a terrorist group?
Yep, the Baader-Meinhof gang, also known as the Red Army Faction, though only because their name was the one that turned up twice for that reader. Researchers use Zwicky's "frequency illusion" instead.
