Jumping to Conclusions
People tend to jump to conclusions. Not just other people, but most of us, as the authors of The Invisible Gorilla explain. There are several reasons for this. First, it’s got to do with how we are wired: “We perceive patterns where none exist, and we misperceive them when they do exist.” To compound the problem, we are prone to the “illusion of cause”: “(We are) biased to perceive meaning rather than randomness and to infer cause than coincidence.” A related aspect is that we tend to confuse correlation with causation. In simpler terms, just because two things happen together doesn’t mean one causes the other. The best example of this danger is the ice cream-drowning example: “More people drown on days when a lot of ice cream is consumed, and fewer people tend to drown when only a little ice cream is consumed.” This example, of course, is so obvious that nobody would claim that the consumption of ice cream causes drowning. And it’s obvious to most th...