Several people believe in superstitions and that other “forces” cause certain things to happen when they do something specific or act a certain way. In reality, superstitions represent a false relationship between two things. This type of inaccurate relationship is known as an illusionary correlation, meaning that it gives off an illusion of two things being related. Two different scenarios can show similar results, no matter how extremely different they seem. An example of an illusionary correlation is shown below.
From: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
This graph shows a strong direct relationship between US oil imports and the number of people killed from trains. Although these two events show a similar trend on the graph, they have no actual correlation to each other and neither one affects the other, it just doesn’t make sense for them to be connected.
For me, I have been basing my success in my education off of an ongoing superstition. When I take exams or quizzes, I will usually wear this specific necklace because I believe it is my good luck charm, which is another example of an illusionary correlation. When I had my Confirmation back in 2013, as a gift, my grandmother had bought me a gold and diamond cross. At the time, this was one of the most valuable items I owned, so I handled it (and still do) with extreme care and would only wear it for special occasions. A few years later when I went into high school, I started wearing the necklace basically everyday. At this time as well, I started putting in much more effort and time into my studies than I did in middle school because I knew colleges would see my freshman year grades. When I started to see myself receiving better grades, I initially blamed it on wearing the necklace and that is when I started calling it my good luck charm. In reality, the necklace wasn’t doing anything; I had just started putting more time into my work. I still wear it to this day whenever I had a major test because it sort of tricks me into doing well. When I don’t have the necklace on for an exam, it throws me off slightly because I’m so used to wearing it and giving it credit for helping me do well. It is obvious that there is no real relationship between me wearing a necklace and doing well on an exam, but it creates an illusion in my eyes.
Your post was very informational and explained clearly what an Illusionary Correlation is. I liked your example as well because I do the same thing with a bracelet I have, even though I know that it does not correlate to my success on an exam. I’ve also had a more recent occurrence with illusionary correlation with a friend. We had gone to a football game just a few days after we had discussed the concept in class and my friend is very superstitious about football. She believes that every time her or I wear white that it’s going to be an unsuccessful game. We were watching the game and she turned to me and said something along the lines about how if we lose it’s because I wore white. I could not help but think about what we had discussed in class and so I tried to explain to her right there and then that the color shirt I was wearing had no outcome on the score of the game but rather there were countless other factors in play, but she choose to continue to believe in her superstition.