Teaching Economics with Media
John and Joan go to see Jen about getting a will done since they don’t have one already. Joan points out that she thought they were covered, but John is scared of wills since everyone he knows that has died has had a will. He seems to be mixing up correlation with causation.
One of the most common fallacies that people fall victim to is the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Simply put, don’t simply assume that because one thing follows another, the first thing caused the second thing to happen.
Bad historical assumptions about why things happen – after all, ice cream consumption was blamed for causing polio once upon a time.
Just because something happened before an event does not mean that the event was caused by that action.