How to Understand and Fight Your Illusions of Cause

So I was skimming through my Facebook feed looking for interesting things to read. For me Facebook and LinkedIn are less about the people I’m connected to and more about the interesting nuggets that spark a desire to learn more. (Sorry faceybook friends…)

I came upon an article headline that stopped me in my tracks: “Short period of parental sexual contact prior to pregnancy increases offspring risk of schizophrenia”. (Link)

What???!!!!

Yeah, I had to stop and read it again. How could that be?

I had to investigate because the article was posted in Neuroscience News.

Curiosity…

Now before I tell you more about what the article said, here’s the problem… Illusion of Cause.

If you don’t know what that means, the best explanation is that it is the act seeing patterns and assigning meaning to those patterns where none exists, it is assigning cause and effect where there is none, in other words a coincidence is oftentimes just a coincidence.

Using the headline above, it’s easy to assign a cause and effect and believe it to be true based upon just the information in the headline… Parents who weren’t sexually active for very long could cause their children to have schizophrenia. Cause and effect.

The problem is… it’s not actually a truth.

Humans have been living under the Illusion of Cause forever. You have done it. I have done it. It’s simply part of how our brains work.

A story… A man is traveling through the desert, he is simply on his way home from a hike. He sees another man up ahead. The man up ahead turns, sees him, and runs. The man continues on his return hike. As he often does, he looks down at the ground to keep an eye on the trail and avoid rocks. After a quarter of a mile or so, he looks down and sees a woman lying off the trail just beyond a low bush. Startled, he stops and calls to her but receives no response. He walks closer and squats down to see if she is okay. He notices immediately that she has a bloody wound to her head and her backpack is opened with the contents strewn about. What has just happened?

Likely you’ll go through a few scenarios in your head. The guy running away… does he know what happened? Did he have a hand in it? Why did he run away? Maybe she fell? But why was her bag opened?

All of the questions are based on the information you have. It’s easy to begin to assign cause and effect to the scenario playing out in front of the man who just happened to come upon her.

But what if he is the cause? What if he injured the woman on his way out on his hike? What if he’s only startled because the body is moved? What if he is now concerned that her bag has been gone through? What if the guy running away is running to get help?

The point is we don’t know anything about what has happened or is happening and yet, our brains try to make sense of what we see.

Back in the caveman days, it would make sense to assign cause and effect to things we saw to protect us. Maybe we came upon a dead caveman and saw animal tracks and decided it might be safer to take a different route. Even if we didn’t know what happened we are primed to protect ourselves.

Today, we don’t need those instincts in the same way. And yet, the instinct to draw conclusions is strong. And when someone else draws those conclusions and provides some semblance of evidence we believe them without doing the work of investigating.

If your caveman buddy says, “hey we must take a different way, I am told there are lions in this area!” You are like, “get me outta here!”

No need to confirm, just go, now! Lions and tigers and bears oh my!

The problem is… it’s a lazy way of thinking. It’s fast and easy but lazy.

Which is why I decided to read the article…

Here’s the thing… yes, the scientists investigated a large group of people… 90,000. Yes, when broken down, the data showed that married couples who had been married for less than three years had children who were at an increased risk for schizophrenia.

What the data doesn’t tell us is whether or not those married couples had been sexually active before getting married and for how long. The study doesn’t tell us if there are inherited vulnerabilities that could account for the findings. The study also looked at couples in a very specific place… a defined area of Jerusalem.

There are far too many questions left unanswered.

The only way…. repeating this for effect… The only way to know for sure that a cause and effect relationship exists is to test it.

But wait… isn’t that what the scientists in the schizophrenia article did? They tested their hypothesis on a group of 90,000 people?

Well, yes and no. Simple questions were left unanswered… like the very obvious sex before marriage question.

The only way to know for sure if their hypothesis is true, is to remove all of those questions. While it might be likely that in Israel pre-marriage sex is low… it’s still a factor that cannot be ignored.

So it must be tested… again. AND even if that test is passed, the hypothesis must be tested and replicated on another group of people. How else could we confirm with certainty?

It is the reason that ideas like vaccinations causing autism persist. We see a cause and effect relationship where there is nothing more than coincidence. All of the research and testing has confirmed there is no direct cause and effect and yet… the idea persists.

Some ideas, like the vaccination illusion, are dangerous. Some illusions are not.

The point in all of this is that if you want to be a better learner, a more knowledgeable person, you must fight the comfort of finding cause and effect where nothing more than coincidence exists. It’s easy to believe that something is true because we read a headline, but is it really true?

The best way to fight the illusion of cause is to ask more questions, look for obvious loopholes and then look to find the answers to those loopholes. Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, in their book, The Invisible Gorilla suggest the following:

“When you hear or read about an association between two factors, think about whether the people could have been assigned randomly to conditions for one of them. If it would have been impossible, too expensive, or ethically dubious to randomly assign people to those groups, then the study could not have been an experiment and the causal inference is not supported.”

When we look at the schizophrenia article again, we see that the pool of 90,000 was not random. The participants were from a very specific place. To be random, parents would have to be selected from a world-wide pool of participants. But that’s not the only problem with the study, as I’ve pointed out earlier.

When we take the time to investigate things more thoroughly, we practice learning at its best… curiosity.

Understanding how the illusion of cause works and what you can do to avoid its trap make you a better learner. And, while we cannot fight entirely the instinct to draw conclusions we can stop and check ourselves frequently. It takes, like anything, a little practice.

You can start with your Facebook feed… before you believe or buy into what you see there, stop and ask yourself if it could actually true.

I’ve only just scratched the surface of the illusion of cause, there are many other biases that play into how it works. But a taste of what your intuition is telling you and how it might be swayed by seeing patterns where none exist is a good start.