Correlation is not causation — but your brain refuses to believe it. A famous graph shows that the number of Nicolas Cage films each year tracks almost perfectly with the number of people who drown in swimming pools. Cage didn’t drown anyone — yet your mind still sees a story in the pattern. That’s a spurious correlation, and it fools smart people every day.
In this episode, I use one ridiculous graph to show why we can’t resist turning coincidence into cause — the trap of confusing correlation vs causation — and what it means for the decisions you make at work.
Based on the book Convenient Truths: The Stories You Tell Yourself. More on the stories we tell ourselves at work: https://nigeldessau.substack.com and https://the3minutementor.com
#CorrelationVsCausation #CognitiveBias #DecisionMaking