Type of Proposal
Oral presentation
Faculty
Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Faculty Sponsor
Ken Cramer, Psychology
Proposal
Cramer and Jackson (2006, 2007) report a sizable association between the home game winner of the most recent Washington Redskins professional football game and the presidential election outcome. With only two exceptions, the events were perfectly linked since the 1936 inception of the football franchise. This paper offers an update to those results, now incorporating the 2008, 2012, and 2016 election results. This paper will offer instructors a useful vehicle to understanding correlations, to further show that correlation is not causation, but more importantly to illustrate that robust phenomena in the world may have no underlying cause. Furthermore, we believe that the relation between these two events represents a shortcoming in post-hoc reasoning, by trying to explain events after they have been observed.
Start Date
31-3-2017 1:00 PM
End Date
31-3-2017 2:00 PM
Football and Federal Elections: Real World Statistics in Action
Cramer and Jackson (2006, 2007) report a sizable association between the home game winner of the most recent Washington Redskins professional football game and the presidential election outcome. With only two exceptions, the events were perfectly linked since the 1936 inception of the football franchise. This paper offers an update to those results, now incorporating the 2008, 2012, and 2016 election results. This paper will offer instructors a useful vehicle to understanding correlations, to further show that correlation is not causation, but more importantly to illustrate that robust phenomena in the world may have no underlying cause. Furthermore, we believe that the relation between these two events represents a shortcoming in post-hoc reasoning, by trying to explain events after they have been observed.