The second most common mistake I see people making when dealing with statistical data and drawing conclusions, or when doing research is called Ecological Fallacy. Ecological fallacy is when you apply data from a group set to an individual. Basically, drawing correlations from group data and expecting them to adhere to an individual. A very classic example of this was Emile Durkheim's study of suicide among Protestants and Catholics. There are other 'suicide' studies that have been created to illustrate this fallacy inside the classroom, so this may be familiar to you if you have taken a sociology class in the past.
Durkheim stated that suicide rates among Protestants was higher then suicide rates Catholics. Therefore, he drew the conclusion that the Catholic church had better social control to dissuade believers from committing suicide. Not only is this a 'Correlation not Causation' fallacy, it commits Ecological Fallacy by applying aggregate data to individual behavior (e.g suicide).
Still not clear?
Okay. Lets say that I gather statistics on how many people listen to country music in a certain city. Then, I compare that to the suicide rates of individuals inside that city. If the rate of people listening to country music is high, and the suicide rate is high, then there may be a correlation between country music and suicide.
A more outrageous example, no? Well the ecological fallacy in this is due to the fact you can't take country music data from the city and apply it to the individual suicide rates.
Sadly, this fallacy is one of the more simple ones to learn, and it is the first one professors often teach, but I still see studies today that commit Ecological suicide.
It is interesting that you bring up this topic of the ecological fallacy. Both examples you used and analyzed-Emile Durkheim's study and the country music study, I have heard before. Truthfully, I "fell" for them without studying and analyzing the observations more critically. If it was not for your post, I may have never recognized that these studies portrayed troubling fallacies. As we are learning in the course, the assumptions that authority is objective, valid and "the truth," represent common ideologies that we grow up with in society. Reading the Mismeasure of Man for example, I have come to realize how easy it must have been to make the racist assumptions that people had in the past. They created reasons for what they were seeing in the most simplistic manner. And by grouping everyone in specific races, they were able to utilize this Ecological Fallacy as you defined it.
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