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<\/a>Kids are everywhere! Or so you think.<\/p><\/div>\n
The frequency illusion occurs when a person experiences something, like finding a song he or she likes on Spotify or becoming pregnant, and then afterwards believes that the experience or phenomenon happens all the time. So why does this occur? Well, there are two cognitive processes that are involved in creating the frequency illusion: selective attention and confirmation bias (Zwicky, 2006). <\/p>\n
Selective attention is the idea that we mostly choose what we want to pay attention to once we filter out a lot of the other environmental information that is irrelevant or unnecessary. It\u2019s impossible for us to pay attention to every single thing in our environment, which basically means that attention has a limited capacity, so we have to focus on and allocate attentional resources to what we think is important in our environment (McBride & Cutting, 2015). While this means we won\u2019t be overwhelmed by environmental information, which is a good thing, it also means that attention spent on one task limits attention<\/a> for and impedes performance in another task (Sanbonmatsu et al., 2016). In fact, we are all selectively attending<\/a> to information, even when we don\u2019t think we are. This is a problem because it can lead us to receiving a lot of information about one thing because we decided to pay attention to that one thing as opposed to something else (Graf & Aday, 2008)!<\/p>\n Now, confirmation bias is a little bit different from plain old selective attention. Instead of just selectively attending to any information in the environment that seems important or relevant, the confirmation bias occurs when individuals selectively attend to information that confirms their beliefs while simultaneously ignoring information that could challenge or provide evidence against those beliefs.<\/p>\n Confirmation Bias at it’s finest!<\/p><\/div>\n This means that we attend to things selectively based on our priorities (Rajsic et al., 2015). When we believe that we see or hear something over and over, we prioritize paying attention to that thing as opposed to something else in order to confirm the belief that we see or hear that particular thing everywhere. This can happen when something changes our lives, like getting pregnant, and afterwards we see that tons of people have kids everywhere we go. Kids and pregnancy are now relevant to us and because we have created the belief that kids are everywhere; We selectively look for families with kids instead of families without kids, making it seem as if there are more families with kids than there actually are. The danger with confirmation bias<\/a> is that avoiding or ignoring information that counters our beliefs can warp our opinions to the extreme about things (Charness & Dave, 2017). This warping of opinions affects all sorts of people like teachers when grading students work, researchers regarding the data that supports their hypothesis, and even doctors and incorrect diagnoses (Charness & Dave, 2017). The nature of confirmation bias is that it\u2019s partially manipulated by top-down processing. Top down processing involves expectations, prior knowledge, and assumptions. Since top down processing is fundamental to a person\u2019s opinions, perceptions and beliefs, it also plays a significant part in confirmation bias.<\/p>\n<\/a>