Casualties of the False Motive Fallacy in 2024

There are lots of messages from science that undergo repeating. Certainly one of them is that correlation does now not imply causation. When headlines come with a cause-effect conclusion in accordance with correlational proof, that’s the false trigger fallacy, and it could possibly misinform the general public with regarding penalties.

I’ve in the past known this fallacy in unfair public judgments of minorities, helicopter folks, law enforcement officials, transgender athletes, the ones with fastened mindsets, and people who Zoom (Stalder, 2018, 2000, 2021), however the headlines stay coming. As the brand new 12 months starts, I replicate on two high-profile casualties of the false trigger fallacy from the previous 12 months: immigration and social media.

Does Immigration Motive an Building up in Crime?

Supply: David Peinado/Pexels

The solution is not any, in spite of many politicians who forcefully spoke in a different way. Their “proof” for the false conclusion appeared to be explicit incidents the place an undocumented immigrant of colour dedicated a terrible crime. However large-scale analysis overwhelmingly displays no connection and, if anything else, that immigrants are much less more likely to devote crimes (Hesson and Rosenberg, 2024; Seid et al., 2024).

No high-profile figures have correspondingly asserted that being a white U.S. citizen reasons an building up in crime after such a person commits a terrible crime. Actually, after a U.S.-born citizen allegedly dedicated the new New Orleans truck assault, some politicians falsely steered that the culprit was once in fact an immigrant (Shabad, 2025).

The false alarm over immigrants appeared because of anti-immigrant prejudice and presidential politics. Some other issue is that there are fewer immigrants within the U.S. than non-immigrants. When two quite less-likely occasions co-occur (being a recently-arrived immigrant and committing a terrible crime), our brains can virtually now not assist however attach them—the sort of not unusual misperception is named an illusory correlation.

Does Social Media Use Motive an Building up in Psychological Well being Issues?

In comparison to the straight forward immigration factor, the query about social media has turn into an empirical mess. There are sturdy, difficult disagreements amongst professionals.

Thru about 2017, social media unfairly took numerous hits when the underlying analysis was once completely correlational (Stalder, 2018). As an example, perhaps teenagers with melancholy had been much more likely to make use of social media, and it was once now not that social media led to the melancholy.

Ultimately, some randomized managed trials, or true experiments, confirmed a cause-effect connection between social-media use and deficient psychological well being, however those preliminary research had too many obstacles to justify a abstract conclusion. Additionally, there have been additionally some true experiments that confirmed no hurt or even some advantages.

Haidt’s The Fearful Technology

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Then in 2024 got here Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling ebook titled The Fearful Technology: How the Nice Rewiring of Formative years is Inflicting an Epidemic of Psychological Sickness. Haidt compiled an outstanding quantity of possible proof and wrote persuasively. To his credit score, he immediately mentioned the cause-effect factor. He referred to twenty true experiments, 14 of which “discovered proof of damage” and 6 that didn’t (even if the six had been best discussed in a footnote whilst the 20 had been exaggerated to be “dozens” that “ascertain” Haidt’s view). Even supposing each and every experiment had no obstacles, is a 14-to-6 ratio just right sufficient, when maximum analysis was once nonetheless correlational?

Candice Odgers, recipient of an American Mental Affiliation award for outstanding contributions “within the public passion,” wrote a scathing overview in Nature. Odgers wrote that Haidt’s place “isn’t supported by means of science” and that Haidt “is a proficient storyteller, however his story is these days one on the lookout for proof” (Odgers, 2024).

In a later interview, Odgers conveyed worry that Haidt was once the usage of a “worry narrative and scare techniques,” which the interviewer steered saved different “distinguished psychologists” from criticizing Haidt “at the file.” Haidt admitted to the similar interviewer that the ebook proposed societal adjustments “sooner than the clinical neighborhood has reached complete settlement.” However Haidt felt it was once irresponsible to attend any more and didn’t see any hurt in his proposals together with cell phone bans at school. Odgers, then again, did see possible harms together with youngster shaming (Thorp, 2024a, 2024b).

A New York Occasions overview in a similar fashion mentioned that there might be hurt from Haidt’s proposals and that Haidt did a greater activity acknowledging the clinical obstacles “on-line” in comparison to his ebook (Dennis-Tiwary, 2024). The Dialog supplied a timeline and a few main points of the new back-and-forth amongst professionals and known as it a “messy combat” (Meyerowitz-Katz and Jané, 2024).

My Tackle Haidt’s E-book

In the long run, Haidt took a “what else may just or not it’s” way, which is likely one of the traps within the false trigger fallacy. Then again, Haidt confirmed nice diligence in analyzing different possible reasons, and Haidt immediately addressed the cause-effect factor, one thing unmentioned by means of maximum critics. Haidt even has an ongoing weblog of types the place he welcomes enter and new analysis. In the previous couple of months, there were a couple of new research that reinforce his view and a couple of that counter it. Two of the counter research don’t but seem in his weblog (Jones et al., 2024; Taylor et al., 2024).

However in different portions of Haidt’s ebook, he automatically used cause-effect phrases comparable to “harm” and “hurt” even if the precise analysis being cited in that segment was once best correlational. Haidt additionally claimed that diminished in-person social interactions (led to by means of social-media use) was once a mediating supply of damage, however that view opens but every other Pandora’s field.

Numerous social interplay isn’t essentially just right. There may be inevitable conformity to friends which will give a contribution to youngster issues, together with drug use and delinquency (Warr, 2002) and extra common crew phenomena comparable to deindividuation, groupthink, or even the bystander impact (Stalder, 2014). And psychology acknowledges that kids who minimally have interaction with friends can nonetheless end up smartly and every now and then even higher than extraverts (Cain, 2013).

In Sum

The immigration factor turns out settled scientifically. The social media tale is way more difficult. Haidt’s ebook had a number of strengths however, in spite of some consideration to counterpoints, nonetheless gave the impression to oversell the message. No longer writing extra in moderation or now not sharing extra of the field-wide disagreements can overly feed into an anti-smartphone fervor and into the correlation-equals-cause considering already too not unusual in on a regular basis readers.