For this blog, I am going to discuss the Illusory Correlation, which is the perception of a relationship where none exists. This can include superstitions, stereotypes, or prejudices. For example, Jimmy could get an A on his paper two times where he wore his Star Wars t-shirt, and he now concludes that the shirt correlates to him getting better grades. However, the shirt has nothing to do with his performance and it is all mental. Also, with Illusory Correlation, a big concept of statistics is revealed, which is correlation does not equal causation. This shows that just because two events correlate does not mean that one event caused the other. My experience with these two concepts was wearing lucky socks for every Cowboy game at the end of the season last year because they didn’t lose for 7 games when I wore them. So, after the first game they won, I continued to wear the socks and believe that they were winning because of them. Another example was my brother always making my mom watch the game in her room because he thought she was bad luck and they didn’t do well whenever she came into the living room. The connection between my experiences and the concept of Illusory Correlation is I convinced myself that wearing the socks was the reason the Cowboys were winning but it had nothing to do with the outcome in the end. Also, after I established this correlation I went around and told everyone that me wearing the socks caused the cowboys to win, which shows causation equals correlation when it doesn’t. These two concepts are seen often in daily life and were interesting to learn about.
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I have a similar superstition as well. I played basketball in high school and for the longest time, almost the full season, I wore the exact same pair of socks. I felt that if I did not wear the socks my team would loose the game. It is so easy to get in the habit of believing in superstitions, especially if they have a good outcome. While reading this post I learned more about Illusionary Correlation and also Causation and really got to see in a real life scenario how correlation does not equal causation. I am sure more superstitions like these will occur in my life, but now I know the background of how and why people tend to think like this and it really interests me.