PSYC 1215 Lecture 5: psychologynotes
30 Jul 2016
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Document Summary
Our brains are hard-wired to look for causal relationships between occurrences and actions. But, that two things occur together does not imply that one has caused the other. In this program, students learn that one of the most common errors found in the news media regarding scientific and health-related studies is the confusion between correlation and causation. In some cases it seems obvious that one action will cause another, whereas at other times it is not as clear. Many studies are designed to test a correlation using statistical tools to measure two variables over time. As daniel gilbert points out, a perfect correlation occurs when both variables change by a fixed amount. Correlations, tracked by using the correlation coefficient (represented by lowercase r), can be positive or negative and vary in strength. strong positive correlation occurs when both variables increase equally, a negative correlation, one unit increases while the other decreases.
