Illusory correlation

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The illusory correlation is an effect in the intuitive synopsis of phenomena when an objectively non-existent correlation between them is viewed as clearly perceptible. In social psychology it is counted among the judgment heuristics and is the subject of prejudice research .

The illusory correlation must be distinguished from the unfounded assumption of a causality or its direction of action between actually correlating phenomena (see spurious correlation ).

The assumption that the frequency with which the media reports on events corresponds to the actual frequency of the events must also be delimited.

species

Fiedler distinguishes between at least three variants of illusory correlations:

  • Expectation-based illusions arise when expected events (confirming a presumed causal relationship) are weighted more heavily or cognitively elaborated more deeply than unexpected events (which contradict the causal assumptions). This underlies many social stereotypes . "Typically" female behaviors are more often ascribed to women than men, even if the objective frequency is exactly the same.
  • Another class of illusory correlations results from unequal processing of given and missing features . If one considers z. B. only the number of deaths from events or only the number of survivors, this can shift the impression of the relationship between the two numbers.
  • Finally, imagined correlations are favored by asymmetrical recording of findings . If the same tendency prevails in two groups (e.g. more positive than negative behavior), but about which one group has more observations, the higher absolute number of findings leads to the tendency in the better examined group to be viewed as clearer.

Salience

Another factor leading to the assumption of a correlation is a different salience (abnormality) of the observations.

A typical salinity assumption of correlation is the claim that the crime rate among immigrants is higher than that among natives. Salience factors are that migrants stand out from the majority through phenotype , clothing and language and that they are in a focus of attention as a result of public discourses. As a result, individual occurrences in connection with the "conspicuous" people can increase the intuitive impression of frequency. If people are later asked about immigrants, they are more likely to associate them with the events and in this way confirm their prejudices. This example also illustrates the availability heuristic .

Influenceability

As an intuitive judgment, an illusory correlation can be influenced communicatively. This is shown by the investigation by Ward and Jenkins. Test subjects were told that there are airplanes that could “sow clouds” to make it rain out of them. They were then presented with information on 30 different days, each of which stated whether it had rained that day and whether the planes had "sowed" clouds. Although the combination of rainy days and cloud-sowing days was based entirely on chance, many test subjects believed that they saw temporal coincidences in the data .

See also

literature

  • Klaus Fiedler: Illusory correlations: A simple associative algorithm provides a convergent account of seemingly divergent paradigms . In: Review of General Psychology. Volume 4, No. 1, 2000, pp. 25-58.
  • Klaus Fiedler: Illusory correlation, in: Rüdiger F. Pohl (Ed.): Cognitive illusions: Intriguing phenomena in thinking, judgment and memory. 2nd Edition. Routledge, London and New York 2017, ISBN 978-1-138-90341-8 , pp. 115-133.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Klaus Fiedler, Henning Plessner: Inductive reasoning: dealing with probabilities . In: Joachim Funke (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Psychology. Volume C / II / 8: Thinking and Problem Solving. Hogrefe, Göttingen 2006, pp. 265–327, here p. 298.
  2. ^ William C. Ward, Herbert M. Jenkins: The display of information and the judgment of contingency . In: Canadian Journal of Psychology. Volume 19, No. 3, 1965, pp. 231-241.