What causes the gender gap in education?
In the 1940s the Belgian philosopher Albert Michotte identified our tendency to believe we could see causality. His book, The Perception of Causality, published in French in 1945 showed how certain very simple visual sequences carry the appearance of causal connectedness. Click this link for an example. This paper is a good recent update on how illusions of causality bias our judgement. Human beings are natural pattern seekers. We see shapes in clouds, faces in wallpaper and meaning where there is just random noise. In particular, we believe we can see causes when all we can actually see are effects. In teaching, [...]