Case file
Frequency Illusion
- Filed under
- Too Much Information
- Also recorded as
- Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, Baader-Meinhof effect
The charge
After you notice or learn something once, you suddenly start seeing it everywhere and feel as if its frequency has increased. Usually, your attention changed more than the world did.
How it operates
A new item becomes highly salient in memory, so you detect it more often and then interpret each sighting as confirmation that it is unusually common. Selective attention and confirmation work together here.
Logged incidents
- Incident 01
After hearing about usage-based pricing, a PM starts seeing it in every SaaS product and overestimates how dominant the model is.
- Incident 02
A recruiter learns a new technical buzzword and then thinks every promising candidate seems to have it.
- Incident 03
An investor reads about AI wrappers and suddenly believes the market is flooded with them.
What to watch for
Ask yourself: 'Did the base rate really change, or did I just become newly sensitized to this pattern?'
Recommended action
Track actual counts over time and compare them with a baseline before concluding something is surging. Base-rate logging is the simplest antidote.
Known associates
- Availability HeuristicWe judge how likely or common something is by how easily examples come to mind, not by actual frequency.
- Attentional BiasWe selectively notice certain kinds of information while overlooking the rest, especially information tied to…
- Illusory Truth EffectRepeated statements start to feel true simply because they feel familiar.
- Mere-Exposure EffectWe tend to like things more after repeated exposure, even when the repetition provides no new value.
- Context EffectOur judgment of an option shifts depending on what other options or surrounding cues are present.
- Cue-Dependent ForgettingInformation can be stored but hard to retrieve when the cues present at recall do not match the cues present…
Source of record