Correlation vs Causation

Correlation vs. Causation

Situation
Causation or correlation?
Wealthy people are thin.

Correlation
Ice cream melts when heated
Causation
Students with fewer clothes perform worse on standardized tests.
Correlation
Money is the root of all evil. In other words, money causes evil.
Correlation
People with long hair do better on audio memory tests
Correlation

Wealthy people are thin. – If one of the variable changes we would not be able to say that the other variable will change also. Wealthy people may have a better diet and they may exercise regularly, not saying that they are thin because of the money.

Ice Cream melts when heated. causation with no lurking variable.

Students with fewer clothes perform worse on standardized test. The performance of the students can be based on more than just the amount of clothes. What if we replace on the on variables, such as adding more clothes to their wardrobe and they still perform worse. We will be able to see that the clothes had nothing to do with the performance of the students.

Money is the root of all evil. In other words, money causes evil. Maybe people with money tend to do bad things. The greed of money causes people to do bad things.

People with long hair do better on audio memory test. The length of the individual’s hair will not cause then to memorize things better. Changing the variable may not change the results. Maybe the individual’s attention span is better. We can get an individual with short hair that has great memory skills.