Question

The adage in psychology is that “correlation does not imply causation.” However, we know that smoking cigarettes causes cancer, despite the fact that most of the evidence for this is correlational. Provide an example of a hypothetical study where correlation does not imply causation and what the researcher can do to further understand the nature of the correlation.

Answer 1

There are many examples where we can see that the correlation does not mean causation.

Hypothetical study:- number of unemployed people in USA and the crime rate

We can correlate  number of unemployed people in USA and the crime rate using the data points, but this study never means that the number of unemployed people in USA is the cause for the crime rate in the USA.

Correlation just tells us that there is a mathematical relationship between the two variables, but it can't be used to conclude that one variable causes the change in other variables. Researcher can perform different statistical hypothests testings to better understand the difference between correlation and causation.