Correlation means there is a statistical association between variables. Causation means that a change in one variable causes a change in another variable.Correlation and causation are two related ideas, but understanding their differences will help you critically evaluate and interpret scientific research.

Correlation vs. Causation | Differences, Designs & Examples

In casual use, the word "implies" loosely means suggests rather than requires. However, in logic, the technical use of the word "implies" means "is a sufficient condition for".Where there is causation, there is correlation, but also a sequence in time from cause to effect, a plausible mechanism, and sometimes common and intermediate causes. While correlation is often used when inferring causation because it is a necessary condition, it is not a sufficient condition.

Usage, and meaning of 'imply'

Example:The faster that windmills are observed to rotate, the more wind is observed.Therefore, wind is caused by the rotation of windmills. In this example, the correlation (simultaneity) between windmill activity and wind velocity does not imply that wind is caused by windmills. It is rather the other way around, as suggested by the fact that wind does not need windmills to exist, while windmills need wind to rotate. Wind can be observed in places where there are no windmills or non-rotating windmills—and there are good reasons to believe that wind existed before the invention of windmills.

Example of illogically inferring causation from correlation

For example:Children that watch a lot of TV are the most violent. Clearly, TV makes children more violent.This could easily be the other way round; that is, violent children like watching more TV than less violent ones.

In other cases it may simply be unclear which is the cause and which is the effect.

The two variables are not related at all, but correlate by chance. The more things are examined, the more likely it is that two unrelated variables will appear to be related. For example:The result of the last home game by the Washington Commanders prior to the presidential election predicted the outcome of every presidential election from 1936 to 2000 inclusive, despite the fact that the outcomes of football games had nothing to do with the outcome of the popular election. This streak was finally broken in 2004 (or 2012 using an alternative formulation of the original rule).

The relationship between A and B is coincidental

Correlation is a valuable type of scientific evidence in fields such as medicine, psychology, and sociology. Correlations must first be confirmed as real, every possible causative relationship must be systematically explored. In the end correlation alone cannot be used as evidence for a cause-and-effect relationship between a treatment and benefit, a risk factor and a disease, or a social or economic factor and various outcomes. It's one of the most abused types of evidence, because it is easy and tempting to come to premature conclusions based upon the preliminary appearance of a correlation.

Proven Evidence

“Cars with flames painted on the hood might get more speeding tickets. Are the flames making the car go fast? No. Certain things just go together. And when they do, they are correlated. It is the darling of all human errors to assume, without proper testing, that one is the cause of the other.”-Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior “Causality = Correlation + Assumptions”-J.N. Berkemeijer

Quotes

Correlation does not imply causation

List of Common Cognitive BiasesWhile people like to believe that they are rational and logical, the fact is that people are continually under the influence of cognitive biases. These biases distort thinking, influence beliefs, and sway the decisions and judgments that people make each and every day.Why do these biases happen? Attention is a limited resource. This means we can't possibly evaluate every possible detail and event ​when forming thoughts and opinions. Because of this, we often rely on mental shortcuts that speed up our ability to make judgments, but sometimes lead to bias.

THEORIES COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

The confirmation bias is the tendency to listen more often to information that confirms our existing beliefs. Through this bias, people tend to favor information that reinforces the things they already think or believe.People on two sides of an issue can listen to the same story and walk away with different interpretations that they feel validates their existing point of view. This is often indicative that the confirmation bias is working to "bias" their opinions.The problem with this is that it can lead to poor choices, an inability to listen to opposing views.

1. The Confirmation Bias

The hindsight bias is a common cognitive bias that involves the tendency to see events, even random ones, as more predictable than they are. It's also commonly referred to as the "I knew it all along" phenomenon.The hindsight bias occurs for a combination of reasons, including our ability to "misremember" previous predictions, our tendency to view events as inevitable, and our tendency to believe we could have foreseen certain events.The effect of this bias is that it causes us to overestimate our ability to predict events. This can sometimes lead people to take unwise risks.

2. The Hindsight Bias

The anchoring bias is the tendency to be overly influenced by the first piece of information that we hear. Some examples of how this works:Like other cognitive biases, anchoring can have an effect on the decisions you make each day. For instance, it can influence how much you are willing to pay for your home. However, it can sometimes lead to poor choices and make it more difficult for people to consider other factors that might also be important.

3. The Anchoring Bias

The misinformation effect is the tendency for memories to be heavily influenced by things that happened after the actual event itself. A person who witnesses a car accident or crime might believe that their recollection is crystal clear, but researchers have found that memory is surprisingly susceptible to even very subtle influences.There are a few factors that may play a role in this phenomenon. New information may get blended with older memories. In other cases, new information may be used to fill in "gaps" in memory.

4. The Misinformation Effect

The actor-observer bias is the tendency to attribute our actions to external influences and other people's actions to internal ones. The way we perceive others and how we attribute their actions hinges on a variety of variables, but it can be heavily influenced by whether we are the actor or the observer in a situation. When it comes to other people, we cannot see what they are thinking. This means we focus on situational forces for ourselves, but guess at the internal characteristics that cause other people's actions.The problem with this is that it often leads to misunderstandings.

5. The Actor-Observer Bias

The false consensus effect is the tendency people have to overestimate how much other people agree with their own beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, and values.First, the people we spend the most time with, our family and friends, do often tend to share very similar opinions and beliefs. Because of this, we start to think that this way of thinking is the majority opinion even when we are with people who are not among our group of family and friends.This allows us to feel "normal" and maintain a positive view of ourselves in relation to other people.

6. The False Consensus Effect

The halo effect is the tendency for an initial impression of a person to influence what we think of them overall. Also known as the "physical attractiveness stereotype" or the "what is beautiful is 'good' principle" we are either influenced by or use the halo to influence others almost every day.One factor that may influence the halo effect is our tendency to want to be correct. If our initial impression of someone was positive, we want to look for proof that our assessment was accurate. It also helps people avoid experiencing cognitive dissonance, which involves holding contradictory beliefs.

7. The Halo Effect

The self-serving bias is a tendency for people tend to give themselves credit for successes but lay the blame for failures on outside causes. When you do well on a project, you probably assume that it’s because you worked hard. But when things turn out badly, you are more likely to blame it on circumstances or bad luck.The self-serving bias can be influenced by a variety of factors. Age and sex have been shown to play a part. Older people are more likely to take credit for their successes, while men are more likely to pin their failures on outside forces.

8. The Self-Serving Bias

The availability heuristic is the tendency to estimate the probability of something happening based on how many examples readily come to mind.It is essentially a mental shortcut designed to save us time when we are trying to determine risk. The problem with relying on this way of thinking is that it often leads to poor estimates and bad decisions.

9. The Availability Heuristic

The optimism bias is a tendency to overestimate the likelihood that good things will happen to us while underestimating the probability that negative events will impact our lives. Essentially, we tend to be too optimistic for our own good.This bias can lead people to take health risks like smoking, eating poorly, or not wearing a seat belt. The bad news is that research has found that this optimism bias is incredibly difficult to reduce.This tendency toward optimism also helps create a sense of anticipation for the future, giving people the hope and motivation they need to pursue their goals.

10. The Optimism Bias

The cognitive biases above are common, but this is only a sampling of the many biases that can affect your thinking. These biases collectively influence much of our thoughts and ultimately, decision making.Many of these biases are inevitable. We simply don't have the time to evaluate every thought in every decision for the presence of any bias. Understanding these biases is very helpful in learning how they can lead us to poor decisions in life.

Cognitive Biases Summary

“It is an acknowledged fact that we perceive errors in the work of others more readily than in our own.”-Leonardo da Vinci

Cognitive Bias Quote

Cognitive biases can impair rational judgment and lead to poor decisions. Learn more about common biases that sway your thinking.

Types of Cognitive Biases That Distort How You Think

<ul><li>Stores use sights, smells, sounds, and other stimuli in combination to produce particular atmospheres</li><li>In some cases, the place itself is more influential than the product itself in the purchase decision</li><li>For example, to create an upscale atmosphere, a manager might choose classical music, subdued colors, elegant perfumes, cool temperatures, sparsely displayed merchandise, and low lighting</li></ul>

Stores Are Using Music to Make You Spend More

<ul><li>Music on top of noise is just more noise.</li><li>Shoppers tend to spend less time in the store when the music is loud, and more when it is soft.</li><li>There was no statistically significant difference in the amount of money customers spent in each of these scenarios.</li><li>Music volume only affected the amount of time people spent in stores, not sales volume. So if you manage a store with limited floorspace, or run a restaurant with limited seating, the strategic use of loud(er) music might help you better manage your customer flow.</li></ul>

The Ideal Volume

<ul><li>The tempo of a store’s background music can influence both the pace of customer traffic flow and sales volume.</li><li>Fast (uptempo) music makes people move more quickly through a store, and they end up buying less.</li><li>Slow (downtempo), on the other hand, leads to slower shoppers, which in turn leads to shoppers having more time to discover and interact with more products.</li></ul>

The Tempo

<ul><li>You can fine-tune the background music of a store by paying attention to the modes of the songs you're playing.</li><li>The best tempo/mode combination for boosting sales at a supermarket: Downtempo and minor.</li><li>People buy more when there are slow sad songs playing in the background.</li></ul>

Play Slow And Sad Songs!

<ul><li>Music is not simply a generic sonic mass, but a complex chemistry of controllable elements.</li><li>What works in one store might not work in another.</li><li>The genre of music you play might end up trumping all of the quantifiable characteristics of your store's ambience.</li></ul>

The Music Genre

<ul><li>Retail soundscapes consist of more than just music.</li><li>Stores engage in audio atmospherics which go beyond songs.</li><li>White noise is perhaps the most well-known variety of this non-musical background sound.</li><li>In office settings, the sound of people talking can be heard as well.</li><li>Natural sounds like birdsong and wind can be just as effective as white noise.</li></ul>

White Noise

Come on feel the noise. Girls rock your boys. We’ll get wild, wild, wild. Wild, wild, wild!

When it comes to satisfying customer eardrums, WWB works best: Wind, water, and birdsong.Natural sounds can be just as effective as (if not more effective than) traditional options for providing ambient noise.

The End Note

The self-proclaimed wine connoisseur swaggers into the wine shop, his Italian shoes shuffling across the pristine marble floors. The ceilings are vaulted. The displays are large, immaculately clean…

Stashed ideas

Over the past 12 years, Chris Anderson has had a ringside seat, listening to many hundreds of amazing TED speakers. He’s helped them prepare their talks for prime time, and learned directly from them the secrets of what makes for a great talk.And even though these speakers and their topics all seem completely different, they actually do have one key common ingredient. And it’s this: Your number one task as a speaker is to transfer into your listeners’ minds an extraordinary gift - a strange and beautiful object that we call an idea.

The #1 Task Of A Speaker

During a talk, X number of people, many of whom have never seen each other before, are finding that their brains are starting to sync with the speaker’s brain and with each other. They’re literally beginning to exhibit the same brain-wave patterns. They’re not just feeling the same emotions; there’s something even more startling happening.

Brains Sync

If we could look inside the speaker’s brain, we would see billions of interconnected neurons in an impossible tangle. But if we looked closer, we would see that a few million of them are linked to each other in a way which represents a single idea. And incredibly, this exact pattern is being recreated in real time inside the minds of everyone listening; in just a few minutes, a pattern involving millions of neurons is being teleported into X minds, just by people listening to a voice and watching a face.

Ideas Teleport

What is an idea anyway? Well, we can think of it as a pattern of information that helps us understand and navigate the world. Ideas come in all shapes and sizes, from the complex and analytical to the simple and aesthetic.Our minds are teeming with ideas, and not just randomly. They're carefully linked together. Collectively they form an amazingly complex structure that is our personal worldview. It’s our brain's operating system. It's how we navigate the world. And it is built up out of millions of individual ideas.

Our Ideas Are Our OS

That’s why ideas really matter: if communicated properly, they're capable of changing, forever, how someone thinks about the world, and shaping their actions both now and well into the future. Ideas are the most powerful force shaping human culture.

Human Software Update: New Ideas Installation

If you accept that your number one task as a speaker is to build an idea inside the minds of your audience, here are four guidelines for how you should go about that task: <ol><li>limit your talk to just one major idea</li><li>give your listeners a reason to care</li><li>build your idea, piece by piece, out of concepts that your audience already understands</li><li>make your idea worth sharing</li></ol>

Guidelines For Successfully Installing Ideas 

Ideas are complex things; you need to slash back your content so that you can focus on the single idea you’re most passionate about, and give yourself a chance to explain that one thing properly. You have to give context, share examples, make it vivid. So pick one idea, and make it the line running through your entire talk, so that everything you say links back to it in some way.

Limit Your Talk To Just One Major Idea

Before you can start building things inside the minds of your audience, you have to get their permission to welcome you in. And the main tool to achieve that? Curiosity. Stir your audience’s curiosity. Use intriguing, provocative questions to identify why something doesn’t make sense and needs explaining. If you can reveal a disconnection in someone’s worldview, they’ll feel the need to bridge that knowledge gap. And once you've sparked that desire, it will be so much easier to start building your idea.

Give Your Listeners A Reason To Care

You use the power of language to weave together concepts that already exist in your listener’ minds - but not your language, their language. You start where they are. The speakers often forget that many of the terms and concepts they live with are completely unfamiliar to their audiences. Now, metaphors can play a crucial role in showing how the pieces fit together, because they reveal the desired shape of the pattern, based on an idea that the listener already understands.

Build From Your Listeners’ Ground Up

Ask yourself the question: “Who does this idea benefit?” And be honest with the answer. If the idea only serves you or your organization, then, sorry, it’s probably not worth sharing. The audience will see right through you. But if you believe that the idea has the potential to brighten up someone else’s day or change someone else’s perspective for the better or inspire someone to do something differently, then you have the core ingredient to a truly great talk, one that can be a gift to them and to all of us.

Make Your Idea Worth Sharing

There's no single formula for a great talk, but there is a secret ingredient that all the best ones have in common. TED curator Chris Anderson shares this secret - along with four ways to make it work for us.

There's no single formula for a great talk, but there is a secret ingredient that all the best ones have in common. TED curator Chris Anderson shares this secret -- along with four ways to make it work for you. Do you have what it takes to share an idea worth spreading?

TED's Secret To Great Public Speaking

In a recently published paper, University of Pennsylvania’s Cory Clark and colleagues (2022) outline the numerous problems created by disputes among opposing behavioral scientists who refuse to recognize each other’s research contributions. Noting that “scientists are humans,” the U. Penn authors observed that “We take it as axiomatic that scientists are constrained by the same cognitive biases, limitations, and tradeoff calculations as mere mortals”.

Opposing And Refusing

When one scientist disputes the claim of another, they tend to argue asynchronously, publishing studies and studies that disprove the original, which lead to further refutations of the criticism, and so on. Throughout this process, the opposing parties rarely communicate directly in real-time, at least in the published literature. They may sneer at each other in scientific meetings, but as far as the words they write on paper, there is little evidence of direct interaction.

Arguing Asynchronously

As dim as the prospects may be for scientists to try to bridge their differences, the U. Penn researchers believe there may be a path forward. Not only would such a move resolve the tensions experienced by these “human” scientists, but it would help advance the scientific enterprise. Indeed, the authors note that “most scholars agree that the goal of science is to build knowledge about empirical reality and pursue truth by testing predictions and explanations against data”.

Eyes On The Prize: Knowledge And Truth

The path forward, Clark et al. proposed, involves adopting eight simple and non-so-simple steps to create teams of “adversarial collaborators.” Although designed specifically to apply to scientists embroiled in longstanding rivalries, their general principles are easily translated into practical tips anyone can adapt to their situations.

Creating Teams Of Adversarial Collaborators: 8 Guidelines

1. Consider the temperaments of potential adversariesSome scholars may be able to participate in adversarial collaborations more successfully than others (e.g., successful adversarial collaboration may be associated with higher intellectual humility, open- mindedness, and agreeableness, and with lower dogmatism, neuroticism, narcissism, and ideological extremism). For many scientific disputes, different “sides” are supported by numerous scholars, and so it may be useful to select an adversary among them who seems capable of carrying out an adversarial collaboration successfully.

Consider The Temperaments

2. Involve a trusted, neutral third-party colleague to be a moderator. The moderator should be mutually agreed upon by all adversaries and will coordinate the effort, referee disagreements, and collect and analyze the data and write up the results. The data should remain under the control of the moderator throughout the project. At the outset, the adversaries and the moderator should agree that the moderator will pursue publication even if one or more adversaries refuses to cooperate and drops out. (

Involve A Moderator

3. An initial discussion should identify a clearly defined disagreement.Both sides should be able to articulate their own perspective in concrete terms as well as the strongest version of their adversary’s perspective and the disagreement in terms all parties agree with. This discussion should leave all parties feeling understood, not caricatured. The moderator should take notes of all discussions; this allows for records that remind adversaries of their earlier statements and commitments.

Agree On What You Disagree

4. Agree on the details of an initial study designed to subject the opposing claims to an informative empirical test. The participants should seek to identify results that would change their mind, at least to some extent, and should explicitly anticipate their interpretations of outcomes that would be inconsistent with their theoretical expectations.

Agree On What You Will Be Tested On

5. Strive for achievable, incremental progress. Accept in advance that the initial study will be inconclusive. Allow each side to propose additional experiments to exploit the fount of hindsight wisdom that commonly becomes available when disliked results are obtained. Additional studies should be planned jointly, with the moderator resolving disagreements as they occur.

Take Baby Steps

6. Be flexible with collaborators. There is rarely one way to answer a question, so if there is resistance to one approach, simply move on to a new one. If one study goes awry (i.e., one or more collaborators are not convinced by the findings), figure out why and fix the ambiguities for the next study.

Go A Different Way

7. Take advantage of preregistration. Preregistering an adversarial collaboration can help lock both scholars into a research plan, which will minimize scholars’ ability to renege if unfavorable results are found.

Block Your Way(s) Out

8. If significant disagreements remain after all data are collected, write individual discussion sections. The length of these discussions should be determined in advance and monitored by the moderator.

Agree To Disagree

If we can’t move forward alongside our enemies, then we should at least be able to move on separately from them. As the The U. Penn researchers note:“These guidelines anticipate ways in which adversarial collaborations can fail and aim to pre-empt them. Although some adversarial collaborations proceed harmoniously, in which case these precautions are overkill, we think it wise to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Disputes with high symbolic or policy stakes can quickly become contentious.”

Moving Forward With Or Moving On From

Longstanding disagreements with people who oppose our views can create personal and relationship strife. A new paper suggests the valuable lessons our opponents can teach us and provides a roadmap for eight strategies to turn those disagreements into productive adversarial collaboration. Its title could be: “Keep your enemies close; in fact, team up with them.”

New research suggests the valuable lessons your opponents can teach you.

Correlation does not imply causation

Types of Cognitive Biases That Distort How You Think

Stores Are Using Music to Make You Spend More

TED's Secret To Great Public Speaking

8 Ways to Learn From Our Worst Enemies

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