[chiffre01]

The TLDR cause was:

The windshield pitting epidemic was a case of collective delusion, where heightened awareness, media influence, and misattributed environmental factors led people to notice and misinterpret existing, ordinary damage as a mysterious phenomenon.

[glial]

Yes, probably -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

[outworlder]

Nice. That probably explains why, say, we start seeing a model car everywhere the moment we decide to buy one.

[nom]

This article was likely posted because of the drone sightings. People started looking more.

[jerf]

It might be better to say that it was a case of a collective shattered delusion, where the delusion was "my windshield normally is not pitted". In modern parlance, it was a collective "can't unsee" moment.

A delusion would imply that people were claiming their windshields were pitted and they weren't... but I'm sure they were.

[lolc]

Don't be splitting hairs. The delusion is that the pitting happened recently and wasn't there before.

[jerf]

It's an important hair to split when people are trying to use this as an example of a whole bunch of people just spontaneously believing something false. It's not that. It's actually a case of people spontaneously realizing something true, and if we're going to apply that to the drone story blindly, that changes it quite significantly. That's why the hair split. "Mass" does not imply "delusion"; that's a thought-terminating cliche.

[lolc]

Ok I'll expand: The delusion was that people held the mistaken belief that their windshield was not pitted the day before they checked. They said: "The pitting happened overnight." Where they should have said: "I don't know when the pitting happened." That can reasonably be described as delusion. That idea, that pitting was a novel thing, was spread by media reports and had no basis.

Similarily, these days people hear about drones in the sky. They look up, see lights, and think the lights they see are drones. Their interpretation of the lights is coloured by media reports. Even if the lights were there last year! And some lights may absolutely be of drones too! Much like pitting was a real occurrence.

The pitting story reminds us that just because there are more reports, doesn't mean there is more of the thing. Because people's perception is selective. And that can lead into delusion.