The mind has a tendency to search for illusory correlations everywhere, whether they mean anything or not.
Correlations in statistics are when there appears to be a relationship between two variables.
As one thing changes, so does the other.
For example, as children age their shoe size gets larger, or the more I practice the better I get at tennis.
We say there is a correlation between age and foot size and a correlation between practice and prowess at tennis.
However, there are also many things that just happen to change together, but are not really related.
For example, when you turn the light on and there’s a power-cut, or when you stamp your foot and there’s a simultaneous clap of thunder.
For a single moment, you feel like you’ve got super-powers, but then you notice it is just an illusory correlation.
It demonstrates a common phrase in statistics: “correlation does not imply causation”.
However, our minds have a tendency to search out these types of correlations, not always with the best result.
To see how easily the mind jumps to the wrong conclusions, try virtually taking part in a little experiment.
Example of an illusory correlation
Imagine that you are presented with information about two groups of people about which you know nothing.
Let’s call them the Azaleans and the Begonians.
For each group you are given a list of positive and negative behaviours.
A good one might be: an Azalean was seen helping an old lady across the road.
A bad one might be: a Begonian urinated in the street.
So, you read this list of good and bad behaviours about the Azaleans and Begonians and afterwards you make some judgements about them.
How often do they perform good and bad behaviours and what are they?
What you notice is that it’s the Begonians that seem dodgy.
They are the ones more often to be found shoving burgers into mailboxes and ringing doorbells and running away.
The Azaleans, in contrast, are a sounder bunch; certainly not blameless, but overall better people.
While you’re happy with the judgement, you’re in for a shock.
What’s revealed to you afterwards is that actually the ratio of good to bad behaviours listed for both the Azaleans and Begonians was exactly the same.
For the Azaleans, 18 positive behaviours were listed along with 8 negative.
For the Begonians it was 9 positive and 4 negative.
In reality, you just had less information about the Begonians.
What happened was that you built up illusory correlations between more frequent bad behaviours and the Begonians; they weren’t more frequent, however, they just seemed that way.
When the experiment is over you find out that most other people had done exactly the same thing, concluding that the Begonians were worse people than the Azaleans.
Explaining illusory correlations
This experimental method is actually from a classic study by Hamilton and Gifford (1976), which is all about how we perceive other people’s positive and negative traits.
In the experiment, people had different perceptions of the two groups, good for the majority and bad for the minority, purely because they had more information about the majority.
It’s not hard to see…
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