Illusory correlation

Biological Parallel

Oystercatchers preferentially incubate giant artificial eggs over their own—the 'supernormal stimulus' creates illusory correlation between size and fitness even when physically impossible to have laid them. Cuckoo chicks trigger excessive parental feeding by exaggerated gapes and calls, creating false correlation between stimulus intensity and biological relatedness. This vulnerability to salient coincidences produces human illusory correlations: clinicians see schizophrenia-drawing correlations debunked by controlled studies, managers correlate employee behavior with irrelevant traits, pattern-recognition systems hallucinate relationships in high-dimensional data. Salience hijacks correlation detection.