Up: [[Thinking]] Created: 2023-06-09 This is a cognitive bias named after a German terrorist group. Someone noticed they kept seeing the name of the group and posted about it in an online chat back in 1994. It was renamed or also called the **frequency illusion** in 2005 by a Stanford linguistics professor, but I quite like the original name. The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon refers to the tendency we have to notice something really often after we’ve noticed it for the first time. An easy example is buying a car and then seeing ‘your’ car everywhere. The main reason for this phenomenon is selective attention. Our brains unconsciously hone in on what we consider relevant information and ignore everything else. Anytime this illusion is at play, there’s also the confirmation bias at work too. The confirmation bias has you finding evidence to confirm your belief while ignoring any evidence to the contrary. That’s why we think that what we’re noticing is actually occurring more frequently.