Talk:Ecological fallacy

message: Can someone point to the origin of this phrase? An attribution would be helpful, even if its "I made this up".
* It's in zillions of books, so I don't think "I made this up" will be the answer. Michael Hardy 23:44, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Origin of the name 

message: How is the ecological fallacy different from Simpson's paradox?  It seems like a link would at least be justified. Gray 21:07, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Simpson's paradox 

message: I don't think "constracted" is a word... but I'm not enough of a statistician to figure out what the right one is.  (Contrasted with?  Constricted to?)  --24.216.66.133 21:20, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Constracted? 

message: The section explaining the origin of the term is wrong: the problem described is not an ecological fallacy, but a reversal of cause and effect: literacy and immigration do correlate, it's just that a higher level of literacy attracts more immigration because of  a more advanced economy, more jobs etc (instead of the reverse, that is, immigration bringing literacy, which is the conclusion the paper is attacking). This statistic can be propagated to individual level as well, showing that an individual immigrant is more likely to live in a high-literacy state. An ecological fallacy would be to find that immigrants actually live in low literacy states. Alfio 22:28, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The original paper matches the correction. The sign changes in the article were because illiteracy had been changed to literacy. To avoid similar confusion on the part of others, I've changed the article (without changing its meaning) to match the references.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 163.1.19.73 (talk) 13:44, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Origin 

message: I rate this article "Start" class at best, due to serious errors and ambiguities in the examples and definitions given for the ecological fallacy, and the lack of a figure or two to help readers understand how the fallacy operates. As time permits I will try to remedy the deficiencies, and I would welcome some help in this. — Aetheling (talk) 19:54, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article quality 

message: The ecological fallacy is not related to sampling per se. This point needs to be edited. Also the distinction between "biased sampling" and "stratified sampling" is vague and incomplete. A citation needs to be provided. Mattjans (talk) 15:54, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Statistical Issues 

message: The "hasty generalization" fallacy is described accurately here as drawing a general conclusion based on too-little evidence.  However, I don't think that's the converse of the environmental fallacy.
One of the college rhetoric texts I have used (I'll try to find it here shortly) defines the fallacies Division and Composition in much the same way as the Ecological fallacy (and its inverse).  The fallacy of Division means to draw a conclusion about the individual members of a class based on attributes of the class.  The Ecological fallacy example given here, the 2004 Washington State gubernatorial ballot dispute, seems to fit the definition of the Division fallacy well.  Another example would be to conclude that any selected player on a winning team must be a winning player.  The Ichiro batting average example also illustrates this fallacy.
The converse of Division, according to the text I was using, is Composition: drawing a conclusion about the whole (class) based on an attribute of its parts (members).  The attribute may apply generally to all of the members of the class.  This is different from Hasty Generalization, which is to jump to a conclusion based on too-little evidence: an insufficient subset of the class.  Although these fallacies are similar, the key difference is that Composition might draw a conclusion about an attribute that applies to all members of the class, whereas Hasty Generalization does not consider the majority of the possible evidence (i.e., concluding that the class must have an attribute that one or a few members of the class have).
An example of the Composition fallacy would be to argue that a team made up of all the most-skilled players would be the best team.  The New England Patriots' recent streak of Superbowl victories shows that this conclusion is a fallacy: the members of the team were not necessarily the ones who ran the most yards in the NFL that year, or had the most receptions - but as a team, the group performed very well together: an attribute of the class that is not necessarily an attribute of its members.  The whole, in other words, can have attributes that are not found by a simple sum of the parts.  (Likewise for the Division fallacy: the parts can have attributes that are not attributable to the whole.)  Memetics (talk) 01:19, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I searched Google Books for "ecological fallacy" "fallacy of division" to see if any reputable sources made a distinction between these two terms and discovered that most authors explicitly state they're equivalent errors.  I went ahead and mentioned both fallacy of division and fallacy of composition (as the inverse), but we might want to merge this article with fallacy of division to avoid redundancy.  —Mrwojo (talk) 02:21, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Composition and Division fallacies 

message: In reference to the "citation needed" post made on Emile Durkeim's book on suicide: The wikipedia entry for Emile Durkeim contains some citations on this. Perhaps this is what the original poster was looking for.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Robinhoode (talk • contribs) 18:33, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Emile Durkeim's book on suicide. 

message: The article states that "Stereotypes, which assume that groups are homogeneous, are one form of ecological fallacy."  But stereotypes need not be predicated on aggregate data, where across group differences can obscure estimates owing to group aggregation, which is an essential feature for the ecological fallacy.  Stereotypes arise from the the blocking of data owing to prejudice and possibly a desire for simple ques to categorize reality.
In the example given: that a particular group of people have a lower IQ than the general population, the expected value of a random member of the particular group would have a point estimate lower than the general population.  It may not be the case, owing to chance, but it is not due to error in the mean estimation owing to the effects of group aggregation .  The stereotype essentially assumes a sampling error of zero, or perfect homogeneity in the population, in spite of variance in the data, and applies this assumption even when confronted with contradictory evidence.
At least so it appears to me, and I welcome correction.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tachypaidia (talk • contribs) 02:30, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ecological fallacy and Stereotypes 

message: "Similarly, if a particular group of people is measured to have a lower average IQ than the general population, it is an error to conclude that a randomly selected member of the group is more likely to have a lower IQ than the average general population" It should be noted that if the group size becomes large enough it no longer is a fallacious conclusion - in the normal distribution, for large enough sample size, median equals mean and it is perfectly symmetrical around those.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.194.107.173 (talk) 06:47, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: If you look at the example in the page with Group A and Group B, the inference that "a randomly selected member of the group is more likely to have a lower IQ than the average general population" is going to be wrong no matter how big the groups are.  The central limit theorem would apply to measurements of the mean test scores for the two groups, or, loosely speaking, to aggregate properties of the groups; comparisons of randomly selected individuals in the respective groups will not approach a normal distribution no matter how big the groups are.  As a matter of fact, the above unsigned comment seems to commit an ecological fallacy. Flies 1 (talk) 18:43, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  mean, median, normal distribution 

message: I was redirected here from Wikipedia's list of fallacies which lists this under "informal fallacies", but this article states it is a formal fallacy. I can't find any sources about which one it is, butI am leaning towards informal fallacy but I'm afraid to change it and I don't know how to edit articles.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.90.163.73 (talk) 10:50, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: There is no such thing as a research fallacy. — The Blue Rider  09:02, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Formal or informal?