The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

A while ago, when I was given an assignment on understanding gender discrimination and feminism, I stumbled on the concept of “Glass Ceiling” in a book and found it interesting. Soon enough, I heard the word everywhere and felt so unsettled, from media channels to discussions in college! This left me feeling almost as if my reading of the term mysteriously started popping up all around me, while obviously that can’t be the case.

Such incidents often happen to most people, upon hearing or learning something unfamiliar or obscure, they start to encounter it, often repeatedly in their environment. Most people will report feeling this way at least a few times in their lives, and more frequently to some others.

It leaves a person mildly shocked, and has often been tied to the idea of destiny where everything is predetermined and all encounters are fated. While science would argue about the possibilities of coincidences, an individual’s intuition often refuses to believe so, choosing to rather believe in the accurate congruence of their knowledge with the surroundings. On the other hand, our intuitions are also frequently prone to miscalculations and distortions. Why then, does this happen?

Also known as the ‘frequency illusion’ in more scientific terms, it is when our awareness of a certain thing witnesses an increase which leads the person to believe that it is happening more around them, even if that is not the case. Sometimes also called the red-car syndrome, it implies how if one day an individual decides to buy a red car to stand out of the crowd, and suddenly notices that they are constantly surrounded by red cars.

The number of red cars must not have exponentially increased in a day, nor have people suddenly started buying it because the person decided to, but the person now pays more attention to red cars after having made the decision. The name originated when an incident connected to the frequency illusion tied to the mentions of Baader-Meinhof Gang, a west German militant organization.

The brain is predisposed to look for patterns, and while it is a characteristic that facilitates learning, it can also cause excessive importance being given to unremarkable situations.

Selective attention affects the information that we choose to consume, and the ones we ignore, and the ones that we choose are often the ones that draw our awareness due to a sense of familiarity. With the amount of information one is exposed to everyday, it is not uncommon to encounter similar content soon after; but the brain stimulates us for successfully identifying patterns and the occasional overlap inflates the value of the stimulus, developing into a sequence.

Often also called the ‘Recency illusion’, it makes an individual believe that what they have noticed only recently, must in fact be recent, which is why its occurrence in the environment must be more frequent. Another factor that contributes to this phenomenon is the confirmation bias, the tendency to seek information that supports our current stance or thoughts, while disregarding those that don’t.

Understanding the Baader-Meinhof effect becomes extremely important in various facets of daily life, as well as from professional standpoints.

MARKETING

We often see advertisements that are repeated constantly on our social media feeds, “the more aware you are about it, the more likely you are to want it” (Healthline, 2019). Marketing strategies like to believe that customers are more likely to assume that the product has greater current value or has set trends, when they see it more often.

It also falls in line with the social proof theory which states that “someone who doesn’t know how to act or think will imitate other people, or turn to peers for guidance” (Caroline Forsey, 2018).

LEGAL SYSTEMS

This cognitive bias can interfere with the processes of the legal system, especially because it can cause a distortion of ‘eyewitness accounts’. Selective attention and confirmation bias are strong driving forces of inaccurate eyewitness testimonials that may also cause development of ‘false memories’.

MEDICAL DIAGNOSIS

Diagnosis heavily relies on identification of patterns and combinations of symptoms, which makes it extremely susceptible to cognitive distortions. Since doctors always have to keep up-to-date and often seek to learn from current medical journals, they could be more likely to diagnose based on something they recently read and may overlook other possible diagnoses, when in a hurry. It becomes important for doctors to stay aware of such tendencies and guard against it.

It is to be noted that the phenomenon has not been acknowledged as a deciding factor for misdiagnosis and does not appear as frequently as one might expect, but can be a strong contributing factor in the field.

RADIOLOGY

While in most cases, it is seen as hampering a task, in certain cases it may be wielded effectively to enhance pattern recognition and help identify findings the others may overlook. This was displayed in the case of a medical student Kush Purohit who happened to learn of a condition and identified 3 more cases within the next 24 hours.

PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

It is also important to understand that while this phenomenon is common, in certain psychological disorders, the effect may be greatly elevated to generate excessive paranoia and suspicion, in disorders such as Schizophrenia.