I’ve seen this referenced a lot, especially with psychology, but can someone explain what exactly it means? How does correlation not imply causation? Sometimes, does correlation ever imply causation?
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You walk out of your house. A flock of birds flies over head. You crash your car on the way to work.
The birds caused your crash?
Two things that happen may happen at the same time, but be unrelated. Sometimes two things are commonly found together – like there is a bacteria that’s really common in people who have the Flu, so much that it was initially thought to have caused the flu. There was no causal link, though. Just coincidence.
With this, because of this, is a fallacy in logic. Two things can happen over and over and just not be causally linked. One doesn’t have to cause the other, sometimes they just have similar causes.
It’s very common for people to see patterns all the time. We’re really great at patterns. This is why we have so many beliefs about really weird things. Star patterns = who you gonna be based on when in the year you were birthed. Really? Nah. But it’s a pattern.
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