Making Connections and Drawing Conclusions

I found an interesting article in the BBC News online magazine about the dangers of jumping to conclusions when researching a topic. The writer, Michael Blastland, warns us about "the assumption that things happening after an event must be caused by it." Sometimes, Blastland says, we are so eager to make an interesting point that we make a false case for cause and effect.

Here are a few examples from the article:

• Fact: Whenever ice cream sales rise, so do shark attacks.
• Fact: In Scandinavia, storks appear more often on the rooftops of families with more babies.

See how we could draw some interesting (but false) conclusions about the relationship of these sets of facts? Do ice cream eaters taste better to sharks? Perhaps storks really do bring babies?

I’m not sure why these events are related, since the writer is making us wait until next week to find out the real answers. My guess is that people buy ice cream around the same time they hit the beach in big numbers. I don’t really have a guess about the storks. Do you?