Will Eating Curly Fries Make You Intelligent? British psychologists Michal Kosinski and his colleagues (2013) studied 58,000 Facebook users who had agreed to share their preferences, and found some interesting correlations between Facebook “likes” and personality traits. Some associations were not surprising, such as a strong association between being outgoing and liking dancing. But what about the strong positive correlation between intelligence and liking curly fries and Morgan Freeman’s voice? Can you conclude that eating curly fries or listening to Morgan Freeman causes high intelligence? No. Even though a strong positive correlation exists, you cannot conclude that one causes the other.
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