Have you ever found that when you are driving a car of a particular model or color, you suddenly notice that same type of car everywhere? Have you ever learned an obscure fact, only to have someone else mention it the very next day? You may marvel at the strange coincidence and wonder what’s going on. It’s the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
Also called the Frequency Illusion, Baader-Meinhof (pronounced badder mainhof) involves two cognitive biases: selective attention and confirmation bias.
Selective attention comes into play because we simply can’t pay attention to everything we encounter. You actually see red Toyota trucks all the time. If you drove on the highway today, you probably saw several and paid no attention to them. But if you start driving a red Toyota truck, you will have a reason to notice them, and you will suddenly see them everywhere.
Confirmation bias is also involved. This is similar to when you are thinking of a friend and then they just happen to contact you. It seems like a strange coincidence, but it’s really not surprising considering all the times you thought of people and they didn’t contact you, or people contacted you without you thinking about them. Thousands of anti-Baader-Meinhof phenomena occur every day: you learn about an obscure thing, and then it doesn’t crop up again. We tend to ignore these non-events and only notice the coincidences.
Where did the funny name of this phenomenon come from? In 1994, a reader of an online forum of the St. Paul Pioneer Press wrote about their experience of hearing about the Baader-Meinhof group, a German left-wing 1970s militant organization, and then suddenly seeing it mentioned everywhere, so the individual named the phenomenon after that instance of it. The catchy name stuck. Readers of the Pioneer Press still recount instances of the phenomenon, sometimes asking for confirmation of whether it is “a true B-M.” Linguist Arnold Zwicky later called the phenomenon the Frequency Illusion, which is a more apt name, but less of a zinger.