The Art of Faking It: How to fake causality

Economics students spend years learning how to distinguish genuine cause-and-effect from mere correlation. But what isn’t taught in class is the reverse: how to fake causality.

This isn’t a guide on how to deceive people. Instead, think of it as a defense manual. 🛡️ In our daily lives, we can’t run perfect scientific experiments. If you send your child to music class and their math scores drop, you have to decide whether to continue based on a hunch about the causal link. This uncertainty creates an opportunity for others—advertisers, politicians, or anyone with an agenda—to intentionally create a false sense of causality to achieve their goals.

Here are two of the most common tricks they use.

Trick #1: Rig the Race from the Start (Selection Bias)

This trick involves strategically assigning the most promising candidates to the most promising situations, then taking all the credit when things go well. It’s not about creating success; it’s about choosing a winner in advance.

A classic example comes from political appointments. Imagine there are two open mayoral positions and two candidates. In many systems, a mayor’s career depends on the city’s economic growth. But is a mayor truly responsible for a city’s GDP growth? It could just be luck or a shift in the global economy. To game this system, a well-connected or favored candidate might be deliberately assigned to a city that’s already primed for success—perhaps it has healthy public finances or a new industrial park is about to open. A few years later, when the city inevitably thrives, the candidate is hailed as a visionary and promoted. The success was baked in from the start.

We also see this in pop culture. In the Korean drama Sky Castle, a legendary tutor has a perfect record of getting her students into top universities. Desperate parents pay her astronomical fees for this “guaranteed” success. Her secret? She only accepts one or two of the absolute best students each year—students who were likely to succeed with any tutor. Her perfect record is a self-fulfilling prophecy: as her fame grows, she gets to pick from an even more elite pool of applicants, making her “causal” effect look even stronger.

Trick #2: Tell a Story by Hiding the Evidence

This strategy involves manipulating what information you see. By either hiding the failures or hiding the real cause, a manipulator can craft a very convincing—but completely false—narrative.

Hiding the Failures

This is the art of only showing the winners. By making the losers invisible, a mediocre or even random outcome can be made to look like a stroke of genius. This is known as survivorship bias.

The best illustration is a classic stock market scam. A scammer gets 1,000 phone numbers. He tells 500 that the market will rise tomorrow and tells the other 500 it will fall. The next day, the market rises. He discards the 500 who got the wrong prediction and repeats the process with the remaining group. After a week, a handful of people will have received six or seven “perfect” predictions in a row. To them, the scammer looks like an oracle with insider information. Now that a false causal link (“he knows the future”) is established, the scammer can start charging for his “advice.”

You also hear this logic when people defend unhealthy habits. The argument, “My grandfather smoked his whole life and lived to be 90,” presents a single, lucky survivor as evidence. It conveniently ignores the thousands of others who weren’t so lucky and can’t speak up because they are no longer with us.

Hiding the Real Cause

Sometimes, the outcome is real, but its cause is misattributed. This is done by deliberately hiding confounders—other factors that are influencing the result.

A weight-loss pill company might boast that its users lost an average of 15 pounds in three months. The ad shows a convincing graph and glowing testimonials. What they intentionally don’t mention are the confounders. The people motivated enough to buy diet pills were probably also motivated to start eating healthier and exercising more. The company takes full credit for the weight loss, creating a causal link to their pill by simply hiding the other, more likely causes. They aren’t lying about the result, but they are masterfully faking its cause.

Ending

Ultimately, faking causality is a powerful form of storytelling. By cherry-picking the hero and hiding the messy details, anyone with an agenda—from a political strategist to a diet pill company—can craft a convincing narrative. These aren’t just statistical mistakes; they are carefully constructed illusions designed to sell a product, win a promotion, or claim credit that isn’t due. Recognizing the script is the first step to not falling for the performance.