Unpacking the ‘frequency illusion’: Lightning strikes, home invasions, random attacks & other things that won't happen to you

The bad news: Horrific things sometimes happen to people and you find out about them.

The good news: It won’t happen to you.

You know how when you buy a red Jeep or a convertible then you see a Jeep or a convertible around every corner?

The same thing happens if you spend your days doing tattoos or removing minor skin cancers. Suddenly you see everyone's ink or you think, hmm, that person should get that mole looked at.

This is known as the “frequency illusion” or the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, a cognitive bias whereby we become more aware of a behaviour or a situation after we have witnessed or experienced it. 

If you had never heard of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, you will experience the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon the next time you hear about the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, which is how the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon got its name.

The feeling of familiarity even about something exceedingly rare is a combination of psychological and evolutionary factors. It’s also a result of social influencing. And it makes sense. We want to understand what we see so quite often we only see what we understand.

We also want to connect with and make sense of the world around us, so everything can’t be brand new all the time. We aren’t goldfish.

However, this psychological bias makes us leap to some bad logic and come to some inaccurate conclusions. 

“With time, this inefficient learning can distort frequency perception, causing overestimation of less common events and resulting in a flattening of subjective frequency distributions,” that according to an impenetrable article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

That’s a fancy way of saying that just because you read a story by a brilliant journalist about a pedophile hurting a child or an arsonist lighting a house on fire inhabited by strangers or a random murderous home invasion, that doesn’t mean it’s common, in fact that's why you heard about it. Such incidents still exceedingly unlikely to ever happen again in your city, anywhere near you, let alone to you.

Statistically speaking, there is a 100 per cent chance none of those things will ever happen to you. 

You will also never win the lottery or get struck by lightning or be eaten by a shark.

News is what is unusual

All the above is my way of presenting the good news that if you are reading this, newsworthy-level bad news isn’t going to happen to you. At least it’s really, really, really unlikely with a probability approaching zero so, easy for me to say, relax.

I was in a courtroom on Friday listening to Crown counsel Rebecca Gill tell provincial court Judge Kristen Mundstock why defence lawyer Jayce Reveley’s client should go to jail for between two and three years for a conviction for arson disregarding human life, specifically for causing fire knowing it was reckless with respect to whether the property was occupied.

In the early hours of Oct. 25, 2020, Dumyn was at the Salvation Army on Yale Road in Chilliwack where he ordered a woman to let him into her car and drive him to the Circle K at Young Road and First Avenue. He purchased a jerrycan and filled it with gas after which the woman drove him to the corner of Charles Street and First Avenue. That's where Dumyn went around back a house, doused the porch with gasoline and lit it on fire.

Sleeping inside the small house was a man, a woman, and three children. Firefighters managed to get the family out and knock the fire down, but only after substantial damage was caused to the main floor.

Judge Mundstock heard that the fire has had long-lasting effects on the family. The adult male had his eyebrows singed and there was some degree of trauma as his daughter’s socks smelled like gas.

“He had a high amount of anger but decided to trust the justice system,” Gill said.

The incident was likely fuelled by drug use and the court heard that Dumyn went to the house to commit the arson wrongly thinking someone he knew was living there. This was five years ago, but the court heard he still lacks insight into his mental health issues, is still using drugs, still living at the shelter.

The court did hear as a mitigating factor that Dumyn has remorse and that he didn’t want to hurt strangers, but because of all of the above he was rated as a moderate to high risk to reoffend.

In another case recently, a 27-year-old man who was high on meth went into a house in Mission to steal items, came across a 64-year-old man asleep on a couch and stabbed him in the head and killed him.

A horrific act of senseless violence by a mentally damaged young man to an innocent victim. 

The criminal conviction and sentencing was newsworthy to be sure, but could have been upsetting to read about given the graphic details made all the more horrifying given that it was a crime committed by a mentally ill, drug-addicted person to strangers. These were two random acts of violence perpetuated on innocent victims by mentally unstable, drug-addled men with enough mens rea to send them to prison.

All very disturbing, but it doesn’t mean we should be terrified of home invasions or random arsons. The fact that these crimes were newsworthy is because they are so exceedingly rare and shocking. 

It’s also the same reason why the BC Lottery Corporation sends news releases and photos to the media when someone wins a large prize. Community media outlets dutifully print the images and the stories. People see that publicity, then walk by a lottery kiosk, remember that winner and, thanks to the frequency illusion, incorrectly think, "Hmm, that could be me." 

I have had dozens of minor encounters with bears, a couple iffy ones, over my years planting close to half a million trees. When I go hiking in the woods, I have an irrational expectation that one might be around the next corner. I don’t worry about it, I know bears don't want to meet humans and black bears are like giant raccoons, but I do think about it even though it is highly unlikely.

Those who investigate child molestations or domestic violence cases or traffic accidents probably view public parks and spousal arguments and intersections differently than the rest of us.

All of this is important to keep in mind knowing that just because you feel like you are witnessing incidents of a certain kind more often, maybe it’s just your cognitive bias. Becoming paranoid about reality after reading terrible news events is a negative consequence of the frequency illusion, even if it is perfectly normal. It can, however, have impacts in professional circles if police officers or politicians think they are seeing something more than they are. Same goes for psychiatrists and food inspectors and shop owners and teachers. 

Those with mental health problems, particularly schizophrenia, are particularly susceptible to the frequency illusion because of a lesser ability to recognize coincidence and patterns or personal delusions. 

All this is to say that I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that just because you heard a story about something terrible this week, you are not going to be mauled by a bear or attacked by a stranger.

The bad news is that you also aren’t going to win the lottery.

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Paul J. Henderson
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