Causality game level 1 tv#

Note that the causal effect could be 'direct' or 'indirect'. So we can safely assume that age causes money kept. The latter would imply that forcing someone to keep a certain amount of money would somehow change their age. In that case, either age must cause money kept or money kept must cause age. However, if the participants were randomly selected, we could rule out confounders and selection bias. In each of these cases, your classmate's procedure might find a causal effect where there is none. For example, spurious correlations due to confounders, selection bias (e.g., only choosing participants with an income below a certain threshold), or the causal effect may simply go the other direction (e.g., a thermometer is correlated with temperature but certainly does not cause it). Inferring causation from correlation in general is problematic because there may be a number of other reasons for the correlation.

Causality game level 1 tv#

Does watching TV make one dumb, or do dumb people watch more TV? It could even be both. The experimenter spoke in an old, obscure dialect which the young people did not understand and therefore mistakenly chose the wrong option.Ĭonclusion: you are correct, but your classmate might claim to be 147 times correcter.Īnother famous correlation is between low IQ and hours of TV watched daily.(Omitting 143 theories I need to keep this reasonably short) The actual correlation is between sickness and money kept, but this variable is 'hidden' and we therefore jump to the wrong conclusion, because age and likelihood of sickness correlates in the demographic group of persons chosen for experiment. Sick people keep more money because they need money for (possibly life-saving) medication or treatment. People who keep more money spend more time time counting it and are therefore older when the age is measured. The amount of money kept is measured and then the age. Older participants prefer to keep more money (maybe they are smarter or less idealistic, but that's not the point).

The age is measured and then the amount of money kept. I can postulate several causalities from your data.