Simpson’s paradox | Definition, Example, and Explanation (2024)

Simpson’s paradox, in statistics, an effect that occurs when the marginal association between two categorical variables is qualitatively different from the partial association between the same two variables after controlling for one or more other variables. Simpson’s paradox is important for three critical reasons. First, people often expect statistical relationships to be immutable. They often are not. The relationship between two variables might increase, decrease, or even change direction depending on the set of variables being controlled. Second, Simpson’s paradox is not simply an obscure phenomenon of interest only to a small group of statisticians. Simpson’s paradox is actually one of a large class of association paradoxes. Third, Simpson’s paradox reminds researchers that causal inferences, particularly in nonexperimental studies, can be hazardous. Uncontrolled and even unobserved variables that would eliminate or reverse the association observed between two variables might exist.

Illustration

Understanding Simpson’s paradox is easiest in the context of a simple example. Suppose that a university is concerned about sex bias during the admission process to graduate school. To study this, applicants to the university’s graduate programs are classified based on sex and admissions outcome. These data would seem to be consistent with the existence of a sex bias because men (40 percent were admitted) were more likely to be admitted to graduate school than women (25 percent were admitted).

To identify the source of the difference in admission rates for men and women, the university subdivides applicants based on whether they applied to a department in the natural sciences or to one in the social sciences and then conducts the analysis again. Surprisingly, the university finds that the direction of the relationship between sex and outcome has reversed. In natural science departments, women (80 percent were admitted) were more likely to be admitted to graduate school than men (46 percent were admitted); similarly, in social science departments, women (20 percent were admitted) were more likely to be admitted to graduate school than men (4 percent were admitted).

Although the reversal in association that is observed in Simpson’s paradox might seem bewildering, it is actually straightforward. In this example, it occurred because both sex and admissions were related to a third variable, namely, the department. First, women were more likely to apply to social science departments, whereas men were more likely to apply to natural science departments. Second, the acceptance rate in social science departments was much less than that in natural science departments. Because women were more likely than men to apply to programs with low acceptance rates, when department was ignored (i.e., when the data were aggregated over the entire university), it seemed that women were less likely than men to be admitted to graduate school, whereas the reverse was actually true. Although hypothetical examples such as this one are simple to construct, numerous real-life examples can be found easily in the social science and statistics literatures.

Definition

Consider three random variables X, Y, and Z. Define a 2 × 2 × K cross-classification table by assuming that X and Y can be coded either 0 or 1, and Z can be assigned values from 1 to K.

The marginal association between X and Y is assessed by collapsing across or aggregating over the levels of Z. The partial association between X and Y controlling for Z is the association between X and Y at each level of Z or after adjusting for the levels of Z. Simpson’s paradox is said to have occurred when the pattern of marginal association and the pattern of partial association differ.

Various indices exist for assessing the association between two variables. For categorical variables, the odds ratio and the relative risk ratio are the two most common measures of association. Simpson’s paradox is the name applied to differences in the association between two categorical variables, regardless of how that association is measured.

Association Paradoxes

Association paradoxes, of which Simpson’s paradox is a special case, can occur between continuous (a variable that can take any value) or categorical variables (a variable that can take only certain values). For example, the best-known measure of association between two continuous variables is the correlation coefficient. It is well known that the marginal correlation between two variables can have one sign, whereas the partial correlation between the same two variables after controlling for one or more additional variables has the opposite sign.

Reversal paradoxes, in which the marginal and partial associations between two variables have different signs, such as Simpson’s paradox, are the most dramatic of the association paradoxes. A weaker form of association paradox occurs when the marginal and partial associations have the same sign, but the magnitude of the marginal association falls outside of the range of values of the partial associations computed at individual levels of the variable(s) being controlled. These have been termed amalgamation or aggregation paradoxes.