http://www.psychofactz.com/post/47943122689/more-facts-on-psychofacts

I don’t even know what to say.

Mod response:

Oh, god, this again. There was actually a study that concluded this a while back. The truly hilarious thing was that one of the ways they checked to see if fatties had fat friends was through social media. They looked at Facebook, basically. So it was “contagious” via the internet.



This, of course, is a bit like saying, I dunno, if you’re queer you’re more likely to have queer friends, so being queer must be contagious. (Note: I am queer.) It couldn’t possibly be that a fat person might gravitate towards other fat people because they have shit in common, or don’t want to deal with judgmental fuckery, or have a common background that may or may not have contributed to all of them being fat. No, it must be contagious.



This is one of the things that we’re talking about when we talk about correlation not being equal to causation. Yes, being fat and having fat friends are (according to one study) correlated – that is, they are found together – but that does not mean that one necessarily caused the other. It certainly doesn’t mean that the preconceived causal relationship the researcher had in mind when he started is an actual cause.



This shit is incredibly common in research on fat. Researchers, journalists, and the general public learn that there is a correlation between fat and $BADTHING, and assume that fat causes $BADTHING, even though this is a classic logical fallacy and incredibly bad science.



Fuck this.



-MG

