Illusory Correlation

A very interesting topic we learned about this week was the concept of correlations. A correlation is a measure of whether two independent factors affect each other. The example we gave in class was the relationship between sleep and one's GPA and whether the more sleep one gets, the higher his or her GPA will be. I remember reading the section of Unit 2 in the textbook that discusses correlations, and there was a specific kind of correlation that interested me: illusory correlations. The book's definition of an illusory correlation is "the perception of a relationship where none exists." In other words, you only think there's a correlational relationship between two things, but really it's all in your head. Let's apply it to our example given in class. Say you participate in a conversation with your contemporaries about how much sleep each person gets, and you start to put two and two together and see that those that get the least amount of sleep aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, and vice versa. If you tell all of your friends that sleep affects GPA, you're going to look like a fool when an actual correlational study regarding this specific relationship is released and it shows that there is absolutely no relationship between the two. You only think there's a relationship, but really it's all in your head. You can also apply the idea of psychologically perceiving something that actually doesn't exist to something other than correlations. For instance, say your roll a die 10 times, and each time it rolls it lands on 5. You might think that the die is loaded, or that in general fives get landed on a lot. But in actuality, you have a 1/6 chance each time you roll it that it lands on a five, so you perceive a sequence of events that doesn't exist. When I learned about the illusory correlation, I tried to think of an instance where I may have perceived a phenomenon that didn't exist. I then remembered this one time when I played Rock-Paper-Scissors with Mr. Vaughn, and he won EVERY SINGLE TIME! I thought, "It's not possible. He must be cheating." But now I realize that each time we played, he had the same chance of beating me, and he happened to win each round. Learning about these new psychological phenomenon and applying them to my everyday life have really excited me for whatever we learn in the upcoming lectures.