Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
Frequency Illusion · Frequency Effect
The illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards.
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Origin
In 1994, a reader named Terry Mullen submitted a letter to the St. Paul Pioneer Press describing how, after first hearing about the Baader-Meinhof Group, he began noticing references to it everywhere. Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky later gave the underlying cognitive bias its scientific name, "frequency illusion," in 2005.
Updated February 22, 2026