Uncharted coincidence?

Whilst researching fighting techniques and weapons for The Connickle Conundrum, I found, what I believed to be, an unusual knife used by Indonesian warriors. The karambit has a crescent shaped, double-edged blade and requires extraordinary skill to be really effective, but in the right hands, it’s lethal.

Now, I had never heard of the karambit or, to the best of my knowledge, seen it used in any film or TV series prior to my ‘discovery’. But, since completing The Connickle Conundrum, I have become aware of its use in several films; the most recent being Uncharted, starring Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg, where the karambit is the weapon of choice for Tati Gabrielle who plays Jo Braddock.

Chris Hemsworth also fights with a karambit in the recent film Extraction.

So, is my spotting the weapon in recent films a coincidence? Has the karambit only recently become trendy for film makers? Or is there a different reason?

Well, I believe my recognition of the weapon’s use in these films since my research, is due to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or Selective Attention Bias, as it is also known. It’s a trick that our brains play on us, all the time.

For example, if you buy a green car, you suddenly notice more green cars on the road, because your choice has reinforced the colour in your psyche.

Similarly, the karambit has probably been used in hundreds of films, before and since my research, but I have only noticed it recently because I stumbled upon it whilst studying.

Baader-Meinhof is a powerful tool also used in marketing, with advertisers using repetition to create the illusion of popularity. Conspiracy theorists use it’s persuasive properties to spread outlandish stories. After all, if you see a theory popping up constantly and you are told that many people believe it, then the story must be true, mustn’t it?

How bizarre, then, that this phenomenon was named after a nineteen-seventies West German terrorist organisation.