The essentials to know about the " illusion of frequency "

It's strange, since you found out that your colleague is expecting a baby, you see pregnant women everywhere ! Is there a baby boom underway ? Everything conspires to make you think so, suddenly : everywhere articles on parenting, reports on pregnancy, ads for childcare equipment and information on the health of babies in the doctor's waiting room. What if you were the subject of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon?

Let's take a closer look at this cognitive mechanism, which is also called the " frequency illusion".

What does this have to do with the Baader gang?

In 1994, a letter from a certain Terry Mullen appeared in the letters to the editor of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, a local newspaper in Minnesota, which reported a curious phenomenon. A few days earlier, he had never heard of the Red Army Faction, nicknamed the Baader gang or the Baader-Meinhof group, but now since he discovered the existence of this German terrorist organization, he has heard nothing but that. In the days following this publication, several people reported that they were living the same experience.

However, there are statistically no more or no fewer articles that appear at this time on the Baader Gang than at other times...  The journalists note the phenomenon as an oddity, without investigating further.

The Illusion of Frequency

A good decade after this event, Stanford linguistics professor Arnold Zwicky published a blog post in which he analyzes the situations in which we suddenly go from being completely ignorant of a fact to feeling that it holds a considerable place in our environment. He calls this the illusion of frequency.

It is not (a priori) the result of a conspiracy with the intention of stuffing you with a new idea, not (only) the consequence of marketing strategies designed to obsess you to convince you to consume, nor (necessarily) that you are a victim of fashion.

It is first of all your brain that plays a trick on you: as part of its job is to record, process and classify the information it receives, it brings any new message that comes to it closer to other messages that seem to be related. It is as if in order to " validate " the relevance of a piece of information, it had to make sure that it is not isolated. This particular attention to concordant signals creates an illusion of frequency. In other words, your brain looks for confirmations when it processes information.

The conjunction of two biases

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon or frequency illusion is at the intersection of two biases : selective attention bias and confirmation bias.

Selective attention bias stems from a vital cognitive mechanism: information filtering. Constantly solicited by signals (several million per day), the brain selects the most relevant ones to mobilize reactions. Among this information that attracts attention, there is of course first and foremost everything that puts safety and comfort at stake (for example, a threatening signal or a disturbing signal) but also that which corresponds to known landmarks.

Also, what we do not know does not a priori attract our attention. On the other hand, once we know about the existence of something, we can easily and quickly spot its presence in our environment. For example, the reader of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press has long missed the articles about the Baader-Meinhof Group because his selective attention was focused on other information. But from the moment he recorded the information of the existence of this group, his brain drew his attention to all the occurrences concerning it.

In other words, there was no more information in the newspaper that appeared on the Baader tape, but the reader of the newspaper paid attention to all the information that appeared on it.

Confirmation bias is a cognitive mechanism involved in the processing of information. It consists in considering as more relevant what goes in the direction of what one thinks, what one believes, what one prejudges... And it implies a solid resistance to changing your mind ! Thus, once our reader has anchored the idea that the main threat of his time is far-left terrorism as practiced by the Baader-Meinhof group, he collects all the signals that go in the direction of this idea.

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon in management

The illusion of frequency is one of the biases that most insidiously leads to discrimination, thus putting managers at risk of acting unfairly without even being accountable.

Indeed, the Baader-Meinhor phenomenon comes to us in three areas of vulnerability :

• The attention span, which is now very much abused by the multiplication of requests: never have managers had to manage so much, coming from different channels and expressing themselves throughout the day on various dimensions of the professional life of individuals and teams. The overheated brain of the manager under a regime of mental overload can have difficulty taking into account all the information that the work environment transmits to him/her. He may then simply  not see what is going on around him... And see too much of what is most comfortable for him to look at in the face. For example, our overworked manager might not see that an employee who was yesterday fragile in terms of skills has progressed considerably... And at the same time, continue to give your full trust to someone else who was very good at one time but whose work is now less qualitative.

• Trust in our intuitions. Management is not an exact science and many of the decisions we make as managers stem from our perception of situations. Sometimes we go " by feeling ". In some cases, the results obtained prove our intuitions right. But in others, our intuitions are wrong, even catastrophic ! Except that if the illusion of frequency gets involved, we risk giving more importance to our good intuitions than to the bad ones. And there, beware of overconfidence that makes us, for example, remember that by recruiting people who look like us, we recruit competent people who can be trusted... But makes us forget that we have not selected the CVs of very talented people, until the day we discover that the profile we had not even noticed was the competition that hired him with astounding results in the conquest of market share!

• Resistance to change. Change  disturbs us, disturbs us, makes us anxious. Faced with these threats to our balance, we are tempted to look for apparently rational reasons to maintain our framework of thought as it is. And what seems more true than something that seems to happen often : people aren't so stupid, if they all do the same thing all the time, it must be the right way to do it! Except that it's not that people all do the same thing all the time, it's that we only look at those who do that thing. Beware of following suit, then : just because it seems to you that all the managers in the building industry do it like you do to give feedback that this is really the case... Nor that it is necessarily the right way to do it !

Limiting the impregnation of the illusion of frequency in our decision-making

To limit the risk of being influenced by the illusion of frequency, it is essential to adopt good anti-bias hygiene: preserve your physical and mental resources, reduce your mental load, know how to give yourself time, listen to your needs, maintain your curiosity, develop your creativity.

It is also recommended to be wary of the obvious : just because a fact is frequent does not mean that it is " normal " or even that it is significant. It would be tempting to believe that it is only common sense to be interested in what comes up most often, but this would be to omit that " trends " are also the result of fashion, the selective attention of the media or the " law of proximity " which wants us to give more importance to what has consequences on our immediate environment than to what seems more distant to us.

It is indeed important to remember that what we experience and what we see is closely linked to our own point of view and ultimately does not say much about reality in all its complexities. An example : teleworking. Managers and employees in the tertiary sector undoubtedly feel that this is the most massive phenomenon of transformation of the world of work in recent years. The reality is that less than a quarter of the employed population has a teleworking position. In other words, thinking about the work of today and tomorrow without first looking at the 3/4 of workers for whom face-to-face work is essential, is probably to miss the point completely.

In conclusion, let's remain open to the diversity of situations, let's work on the circulation of points of view, let's be more interested in what seems rare to us (but perhaps not so rare) than in what seems " normal " to us.