Selected Frequency

[...] Despite science’s cries that a world as complex as ours invites frequent coincidences, intuition tells us that such an explanation is inadequate. Intuition tells us that Baader-Meinhof strikes with blurring accuracy, and too frequently to be explained away so easily. But over the centuries, science has told us that intuition itself is highly flawed, and not to be blindly trusted.

The reason for this is our brains’ prejudice towards patterns. Our brains are fantastic pattern recognition engines, a characteristic which is highly useful for learning, but it does cause the brain to lend excessive importance to unremarkable events. Considering how many words, names, and ideas a person is exposed to in any given day, it is unsurprising that we sometimes encounter the same information again within a short time. When that occasional intersection occurs, the brain promotes the information because the two instances make up the beginnings of a sequence. The brain’s reward center actually stimulates us for successfully detecting patterns, hence their inflated value. In short, patterns are habit-forming. What we fail to notice is the hundreds or thousands of pieces of information which aren’t repeated, because they do not conform to an interesting pattern. This tendency to ignore the “uninteresting” data is an example of selective attention.

In reality, we humans tend to grossly underestimate the probability of coinciding events. There are so many things happening all the time in our environments that coincidences are not as rare as they seem, in fact they occur frequently. We just don’t notice them most of the time, because our attention is often elsewhere during one or both coinciding events. When something changes the priorities of our attention, we will naturally be receptive to a different variety of coincidences, and these will seem novel.

But when we hear a word or name which we just learned the previous day, it often feels like more than a mere coincidence. This is because Baader-Meinhof is amplified by the recency effect, a cognitive bias that inflates the importance of recent stimuli or observations. This increases the chances of being more aware of the subject when we encounter it again in the near future. [...]

The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon – Alan Bellows (2006)

Why are many people – including, on occasion, linguists – inclined to systematic dogged misapprehensions about variation in language (like the five below, from postings to the Language Log over the past two years)? These illusions follow from psychological processes and social practices, combined with bits of language ideology, and are facilitated by the fact that hardly anyone has a panoptic view of language variation; we mostly have to think about it on the basis of our personal experience. [...]

[...] The Frequency Illusion is a result of two well-known psychological processes, selective attention (noticing things that are salient to us, disregarding the rest) and confirmation bias (looking for things that support our hypotheses, disregarding potential counterevidence), which also contribute to the two group illusions, through the mediation of various social divisions between Us and Them (which make certain features salient to us). In the case of the Recency and Out-Group Illusions, certain features are salient because they are judged to be bad, in particular because they are perceived as innovative; innovations are (ceteris paribus) bad, because, according to a widespread piece of language ideology, innovations arise from laziness, ignorance, and putting on airs.

The age and group illusions depend on our inclination to take ourselves as the measure of all things; we treat our own experiences as fair samples of the phenomena in question. Even when other possibilities are available, we tend to generalize from our own perceptions, reasoning by anecdote; ordinary people don’t reason like scientists and will often resist expert opinion in favor of their own. Of course, most of the time, there’s no alternative; hardly anyone is in a position to sample the phenomena scientifically, almost all of us are in a state of ignorance, so our perceptions, memories, beliefs, and opinions are all we have to go on. We’re set up to be illuded.

Why are we so illuded? – Arnold Zwicky (2006)