Illusory correlation

Illusory correlation is the tendency relations between phenomena to "see" who have actually nothing to do with each other. It belongs in social psychology to the judgment heuristics, which represent rules of thumb to come despite great uncertainty in situations fast and economic judgments. Generally it is called illusory correlation when the correlation subjective estimate of the objective correlation deviates. This leads to systematic misperceptions of contexts, ie People take relationships between independent events true.

Fiedler ( 2000) distinguishes at least three types of illusory correlations:

• Expectancy -based illusions occur when expected events are weighted more heavily or elaborated cognitively deeper than unexpected. This is many social stereotypes based. So " typical " female behavior, women are also often attributed as men when the objective frequency is exactly the same.
• Another class of illusory correlations caused by the uneven processing of existing and missing features.
• Finally imaginary correlations caused by skewed frequency distributions. If the same trend (eg, more positive than negative behavior ) exists in two groups, however, one group be more observations, the trend in the larger group appears clearly.

Often illusory correlations go back to the fact that certain events more salient ( conspicuous ) than others. A typical bias associated with illusory correlation is that some people mistakenly think that immigrants are criminal than locals, which can be proven wrong. This view may be due to the fact that crimes are much more salient, as a law- abiding behavior. While the vast majority of immigrants is peaceful, and this event remains only poorly in the memory, because it is not very salient. Individual crimes that are committed by a small number of immigrants, however, remain fresh in the minds, as they are very salient. If the people afterwards asked about immigrants, they associate this with the more salient events and in this way develop prejudices. This example also illustrates the availability heuristic.

Another example of an illusory correlation is the study of Ward and Jenkins (1965). Subjects were told that there were planes that "cloud seeding " might be able to make it rain from it. They offered them information on thirty different days is who testified in each case whether it had rained that day and whether the aircraft "seeded " clouds were. Although the compilation of rainy days and Wolkensaattagen completely based on chance and there was no association in truth, said the test subjects, the "cloud seeding " of the aircraft is effectively and causing rain.