Tag Archives: illusory correlation

Very Superstitious

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It is exceptionally interesting how the brain tries to make sense of every little thing in life. You may eat Cheerios one night, have a snow day on an exam day the following day and have things rescheduled. Your brain will think something’s up. So the next five exam days you eat Cheerios the night before expecting the same results, but nothing comes of it. Maybe it was obvious that last attempt in July would not work… It happens to the best of us to varying degrees: superstition.

Now, picture this scenario. You go to a country concert, only because your best friend pulled your leg to come with them. You, being the classical, Tchaikovsky listening music buff you are, have no interest in Martina McBride or any sort of ‘twang’ in music for that matter. So what do you do? You observe the crowd and start generalizing and stereotyping the people around you. You now go home thinking that every country music listener rides tractors, drinks cold beer on Friday nights and likes perfectly fitting blue jeans and cutoff tees. (On a side note, country artists ought to start writing about different topics, but that’s beside the point.) You may have done this many times in your life: stereotyping.

The psychological reasoning behind both superstitions and stereotyping is known in the science world as illusory correlation (‘’Illusory’’ which comes from ‘’illusions’’ and correlations as in a relationship). This is the idea that our brain tries to create correlations or relationships between things, people, behaviors, or events that are not even associated with each other. That bowl of Cheerios on your study session night or the tractor loving, country music listening stranger walking passed you are simply perceptions of an illusion that your mind has created for you and in which you believe in. It’s almost like a mirage.

Personally every Sunday in the fall and early winter months, I give into illusory correlation big time. During the NFL season when I’m either at a Baltimore Ravens game when they’re home or watching it with family and friends in the comfort of my living room, superstition engulfs my environment. That’s right. We’re talking about assigned seats in the living room, only high fives on scoring drives, and bobbleheads that are placed just right. Sometimes we do things as a parody of ourselves… But yet we still perceive that our nonsense affects the game, or think it is funny to believe it affects the game.

One instance that shrill gets me today is when my neighbor would wear his Ngata jersey who is a defensive lineman for the Ravens. For five straight games he would wear this jersey to find out that each time he would wear it, the Ravens would win! The following week, his jersey was getting washed and wasn’t dry, so he wore a Ray Lewis jersey to our house for game day. What do you know, the Ravens lost. The following year, we started to test this theory that his jersey affected the outcome of the football games. Although not 100% effective, the Ravens ended up into the playoffs and became super bowl champions, all because of the Ngata jersey. Okay, actually not.

We like to perceive that our actions had affected the season but in reality, if the actual illusory correlation was true, the Ravens would be super bowl champions every year. As happy as that’d make me, it’s not happening. And I can say as a diehard Ravens fan who bleeds purple, the next super bowl win for the Ravens won’t be coming very soon. At any rate, illusory correlation in my life is here to stay. Whether you are extremely superstitious, giving into stereotypes or think you are none of the above, you have most likely had experience with illusory correlation at least once in your life. This is one psychological aspect that is difficult to explain sometimes, but is very apparent in all human beings. Go Ravens! But don’t take my seat during gameday…

Illusory Correlation

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Haley Hendel

Psych 100.003

5 Feb 2014

Illusory Correlation

            A couple of weeks ago, I was driving around with my newly licensed sister. Like any teenage girls, we were blasting the radio and singing at the top of our lungs.  She then turned down the music and began telling me about a song by One Direction, “Happily,” that she loved on their new album but never heard on the radio. In what was a large coincidence, “Happily” was the next song played on the radio. Naturally, my sister started screaming that she was a psychic and that the song was playing on the radio because of her. I tried convincing her that it was merely coincidental, but she refused to believe it.

My sister, Tina, who has never taken a psychology class, did not want to believe that her “psychic” prediction was actually an illusory correlation. An illusory correlation is a psychological phenomenon in which a person associates two things that are actually not or barely correlational. Illusory correlations can lead to many things, often more serious than just a person just believing he or she has psychic powers. Illusory correlations are one of the biggest gateways to stereotypes. For example, if a person’s brunette friends do better than their blonde friends on an exam, they could falsely assume that brunettes are smarter than blondes. Because that thought is now in that person’s mind, they will try and find more proof for it, and dismiss any evidence against it, reinforcing the untrue belief.

Proof of illusory correlation stemmed from a study done by Hamilton and Gifford in 1976. They created a hypothesis that stereotypes about minorities came from illusory correlations. The researchers formed two different groups, A (the majority) and B (the minority), and participants were told behavioral sentences about different people from each group, with the same proportion of good traits to bad traits in each group. The researchers found that people more strongly related the bad traits to the minority group, even though they had no more bad qualities than the majority group.

Though that study was done in a laboratory setting, illusory correlations can be seen everywhere, like people connecting pain to bad weather, race to intelligence, etc. In my sister’s case, her mention of “Happily” before it came on the radio led her to believe she developed extrasensory powers, but being that it was actually an illusory correlation, her following guess of what song would be played after “Happily” was indeed wrong.

 

References

McMahon, Mary, and Nancy Fann-Im. “What Is Illusory Correlation?” WiseGeek. Conjecture, 18 Jan. 2014. Web. 03 Feb. 2014.

“IB Psychology @ Pamoja.” IB Psychology Pamoja RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Feb. 2014.

Illusory Correlation

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Illusory correlation can be defined as “the perception of a relationship where none exists” (Wede Psych 100 Lecture 3). In my life, illusory correlation exists primarily in superstitions that I have held onto as I’ve gotten older, though in general, it is prominent in other circumstances such as prejudice, stereotypes, and seeing order in random events when there is, in fact, no order whatsoever.

I have been superstitious since I was about nine years old. At this age, I had just begun competing in dance competitions, where everyone would discuss their “lucky shoes” or how they hadn’t sat in this spot last time they performed well, so they had to move to the same area as before or they would perform poorly. It was at this point in my life that I realized I didn’t have any objects I considered “lucky,” nor did I have any ritual to ensure a good performance. So, of course, I looked for “lucky” things as soon as I got home. It was only a few weeks later that I bought a small rubber frog from a coin machine at the movie theater. His name became “Lucky Frog,” and from that point on I made sure he was at every soccer game, every dance competition, and of course he was always at school with me whenever I had a test. At first I didn’t really think of him as an actual lucky charm, but as time went on, I depended on him more and more. About six months after I bought him, there was a math test at school. Unfortunately, the night before the test, my dog ate “Lucky Frog,” swallowing him whole. There was no time to buy a new one (not that I believed a new one would be lucky like the original) and I had to take a test the next day without him for the first time in what felt like years. As it turned out, I did fine on the test, in fact, I got an A. I then realized he was never lucky at all, but that I had just believed he was so I would feel better about whatever it was I wanted to do well in—soccer, school, or dance. This is the first experience I can recall of ever having illusory correlation present in my life. Even being so young, I realized the frog was never lucky; he was always just a frog. However, since I believed so wholeheartedly that he was lucky, I believed I was going to perform well while he was there, and so I did do well, but because I was confident in myself, not because of “Lucky Frog.” Though I realized this a long time ago, to this day I still hold onto some superstitions like wearing my “lucky” socks on exam day and eating certain things at certain times before an important event. I know they are just illusory correlations, but for some reason they still help me feel confident in myself when I need it.