When you can’t stop seeing the thing you’ve just discovered

55 snips

Feb 16, 2026

Luan (Luanne) Wise, marketing consultant and trainer, and Tom Bowden-Green, marketing lecturer, explain why a suddenly noticeable tune or trend feels like it’s everywhere. They explore the frequency illusion, projection and empathy gaps, herd behaviour, the uptrend effect, and how names and pronouns change engagement. Short, curious and full of behavioural quirks.

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ANECDOTE

A 1925 Language Guide Mistake

Martin van Muelen checked Dutch language guides and found claimed common words were actually rare in corpora.
He concluded authors had been directed to notice rare forms and thus fell for the frequency illusion.

INSIGHT

Attention Primes Perception

Paying attention to a stimulus primes our brains to spot it more in future, without it becoming objectively more frequent.
This priming explains misperceptions like imagined crime waves or misdiagnosed rare diseases.

INSIGHT

Why We Misread Others' Valuations

The empathy gap links to the endowment effect and shows people mispredict others' valuations and emotions.
Buyers and sellers misestimate each other's prices because they can't adopt the other's emotional perspective.

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I watched Home Alone and suddenly started hearing the theme tune everywhere.

I thought I was going insane.

But Tom Bowden-Green and Luan Wise explained that I actually fell for a fairly well-known bias.

A bias you’ve almost certainly experienced as well.

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Today’s sources:

Costello, J. P., Garvey, A. M., Germann, F., & Wilkie, J. E. B. (2024). The Uptrend Effect: Encouraging healthy behaviors through greater inferred normativity. Journal of Marketing Research, 61(1), 110–127.

Cruz, R. E., Leonhardt, J. M., & Pezzuti, T. (2017). Second person pronouns enhance consumer involvement and brand attitude. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 39(1), 104–116.

Khan, U., & Dhar, R. (2006). Licensing effect in consumer choice. Journal of Marketing Research, 43(2), 259–266.

Lim, S., van Osselaer, S. M., Goodman, J. K., Fuchs, C., & Schreier, M. (2024). The Starbucks effect: When name-based order identification increases customers’ store preference and service satisfaction. Journal of Retailing, 100(2), 316–329.

Sahni, N. S., Wheeler, S. C., & Chintagunta, P. (2018). Personalization in email marketing: The role of noninformative advertising content. Marketing Science, 37(2), 236–258.

Van Boven, L., Dunning, D., & Loewenstein, G. (2000). Egocentric empathy gaps between owners and buyers: Misperceptions of the endowment effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(1), 66–76.

van der Meulen, M. (2022). Are we indeed so illuded? Recency and frequency illusions in Dutch prescriptivism. Languages, 7(1), 42.

Zwicky, A. (2006). Why are we so illuded. Retrieved from https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/LSA07illude.abst.pdf