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www.psychlotron.org.uk
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Name of resource: Interpreting correlations
Submitted by: Aidan Sammons
Specification details: All
Other specifications:
Guidance: four examples of real-world correlations for the students to try to interpret.  Aims to 
get them thinking about direction of causality and third variables, so usually good discussion
fodder.  Points worth raising:

1) Praise and student performance - does praising students make them perform betterm or do 
better-performing students get more praise?
2) Expect suggestion that watching violent TV makes you an aggressive person, but some usually
spot that aggressive people might be drawn to certain types of media content.
3) clearly to do with hotter weather - leads to higher ice-cream sales & more people swimming but
they may take a while to work this out.
4) they almost never spot the third variable (city size) so prepare yourself for some very wierd
suggestions about how this link might be causal.