In grad school I undertook a large project involving a repeated measures design that looked at correlations among 20 different factors and all the possible combinations. Found all kinds of stuff signficant at 0.01 but a lot was junk. A big fishing expedition that my thesis committee rightly pointed out.

Chris at Smart Football has recomended two books over the years related to cognitive psy—Daniel Ariely’s on Irrationality and Kahneman’s “Think Fast, Think Slow.” A point made in both (and in many other books about human reasoning) is that we look for patterns in all types of information from our general environment. This “coherence seeking” leads us to make many false cause and effect conclusions.

In the latest, presidential race I thought it telling that people talked about the football score correlations (I believe it involved the Redksins) as “predictions” regarding the outcomes of elections. And of course this latest election bucked the trend. In the meantime all these “knowers” ignored Nate Silver and his actuarial model (in which he was right).

Thanks Chase for the post. Can’t wait to see how the intuitive thinkers weigh in with disagreement.