Apparent conspiracy correlations often dissolve once a third confounding factor is recognized

Evidence

The last trait involves illusory pattern perception: Re-interpreting random events and imbuing them with substantive meaning. I sent Alan Tarica the article on the link between illusory pattern perception and conspiratorial thinking because I honestly felt he was seeing patterns in the sonnets where there are none. The Plandemic video is no different: it mentions (in a suggestive tone) that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Hmm, coincidence? Yes, in fact, as it is well known that the NIH funds many labs around the world. The 5G conspiracy displays a very similar tendency, where coronavirus hotspots and the location of 5G masts are suddenly causally connected as part of a sinister plot, even though a third factor can readily explain the increased presence of both phone masts and disease outbreaks: population density. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 217

Categorization

• XREF: The population-density confound explanation is a textbook instance of the confounding-variable logic used throughout social science; ties to illusory-pattern-perception research literature. — connects to: Conspiracies involving over a thousand people mathematically fall apart quickly — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 174