Hence, it was wrongly inferred that it was safer to travel in the middle than on the side of the road. 17. Another area of concern has been the misuse of statistics coming from spurious correlation and attributing such relation to type of cause and effect phenomenon. In most cases a common variable, most importantly “time” works as a link.
Let us take another example. Number of people watching TV serials and number of buffaloes will register a high correlation. If one tries to link them and finds a causal relationship is simply absurd. It is easy to get carried way. One of the prime misuses of statistics is finding a strong relationship between two variables when actually such correlation is spurious.