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.