RE: So often we seem to blame the first correlation and look no deeper... is this tendency used against us?

[strangerarray]

In his book, Influence: Science and Practice Fourth Edition, Robert B. Cialdini described, as @dwinblood put it "our human nature to prefer to always take the easy path", as such:

You can disagree but when you examine the actions you take daily, you notice that there are too many things to do to think things out thoroughly and so instead you fall back on “short-cuts” in thinking to get you through the day.

It is necessary to stop and look deeper if you want find out why and what are the causes beyond correlations.

Comments

[dwinblood]

Thank you for your response. This is it exactly. Yet training ourselves to do this takes some effort. Even if you don't have the time to do this, perhaps if you (not you specifically) could learn to not knee jerk react and respond to something when you yourself have not examined the issue in detail, that would be a step in the right direction. If people stop picking a SIDE and realize there should be no sides, we might get somewhere.