Teslas and the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon
Has this ever happened to you?
I’d be surprised if it hasn’t.
You notice something for the very first time and then you read it or hear it mentioned all the time everywhere. Therefore you think what you have just noticed is particularly common and frequent when in fact it isn’t. Its apparent frequency is just a product of your biased – or rather, pre-primed – perception.
An example could be people with multi-dyed hair or men wearing quilted anoraks that are two sizes too small [insert your own example here].
There’s a name for this well-known phenomenon: ‘the frequency illusion’.1 It’s a cognitive bias that, in my estimation, particularly afflicts people with an unhealthy interest in how people use language – ‘language peevers’ as the uncharitable label them/us.
For I number myself among such peevers.
This perceptual phenomenon also goes under the name of the ‘Baader-Meinhof phenomenon’.2
I mention all this because I was forcefully reminded of it the other day while driving up from Cornwall to Yorkshire, a distance of about 360 miles.
There seemed to be masses of Teslas on the road. ‘Oh, there’s another one’, thought I when yet one more overtook us as we dawdled in the slow lane to save fuel and, more importantly, to save our nerves. ‘That’s great: people are really making the transition to electric cars’, I wittered inwardly. Then I realled up and started counting how many non-Teslas went past us: perhaps 100 to 1, if not 200 to 1.
And then I started thinking, ‘This is probably not even “typical” traffic. This is drivers in the fast lane of a given motorway.’
It turns out that my estimate of a ratio of 1:200 Tesla:non-Tesla was insanely inaccurate. This site, which claims to list the makes of the most frequent cars in the UK, puts Tesla in 46th place, behind the luxury brand Aston Martin, and assigns it a piffling 12,249 cars out of the total of 32.5 million in the UK. So, all things being equal, or ceteris paribus, you might expect to see ONE Tesla every 2,653 cars.
My Tesla spotting on the motorway was truly an example of the frequency illusion.
When you are next tempted to peeve linguistically, bear that in mind.
1 It was Arnold Zwicky who first coined the term ‘frequency illusion’ in 2006, as described here. It relies on two mental or cognitive tics: first, ‘selective attention’, to register something strongly in the first place, and then ‘confirmation bias’. The term is now in the OED, as per one of the screenshots.
2 The Baader-Meinhoff effect. This designation from the way that, in 1994, someone in an online discussion group, having never previously known of that group of psychopathic Red German nutters the Baader-Meinhof gang, who by that date had ceased to be newsworthy, heard them mentioned by a friend and then came across two written references to them in the next 24 hours.
As the coiner of the term put it: ‘The phenomenon goes like this: The first time you learn a new word, phrase or idea, you will see that word, phrase or idea again in print within 24 hours.’
