Consider assertions such as “they failed because they lacked experience” or “they succeeded because they had a brilliant leader.” It would be easy for you to think of counterexamples, in which inexperienced teams succeeded and brilliant leaders failed. The correlations of experience and brilliance with success are at best moderate and probably low. Yet a causal attribution is readily made. Where causality is plausible, our mind easily turns a correlation, however low, into a causal and explanatory force. Brilliant leadership is accepted as a satisfactory explanation of success, and
...more
