Practice question · Multiple choice
Ice-cream sales and drowning deaths rise and fall together across the year. Nobody thinks ice cream causes drowning. Why does this obvious case generalise into a rule that applies to correlations where the third factor is NOT obvious?
Hints
- Why exactly are you confident ice cream does not cause drowning? Now check whether that reason is available in other cases.
- Ask what it means when you cannot think of a third variable.
Show the answer
D. Because the logical structure is identical either way.
Why
The example is chosen because the confounder is easy to see, and that obviousness makes the lesson feel narrow. Strip out the content and the structure is bare. When a study reports that breakfast-eaters weigh less, the absence of an obvious confounder is a fact about your imagination, income and health consciousness are sitting right there.
Practise Quasi-Experimental and Non-Experimental Designs
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Psychology I is free to start.
More questions on Quasi-Experimental and Non-Experimental Designs
- A large and statistically robust correlation is enough to establish which variable causes the other.
- Comparing two regions before and after a policy the researcher did not control is quasi-experimental, not…
- Sort each design by whether it can, on its own, establish causation.
- A quasi-experiment compares crime rates in a city before and after a new law, which the researcher had no…
- You are handed a study reporting that a variable X is associated with an outcome Y, and asked whether X…
- You cannot randomly assign people to a hurricane, yet the health effects of disasters are studied causally.…