Causation vs correlation

Causation means that one thing directly causes another to happen; for example, smoking causes lung cancer. Correlation, on the other hand, means two things occur together more often than by chance, but one doesn't necessarily cause the other—like ice cream sales and drowning incidents both increase in summer, but eating ice cream doesn’t cause drowning. Recognizing the difference helps prevent false assumptions about relationships between things. Just because two factors are linked doesn't mean one is causing the other; sometimes they are just coincidentally related or influenced by a third factor.