Original artwork, not a still
The alt text of xkcd #552, "Correlation" (2009)
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
— xkcd · 2005
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
It is the statistician's caveat with a wink: two things moving together hints that something is going on, just not what you were told. Fans quote it whenever a chart is used to imply a cause it cannot prove, and it is the usual reply to a spurious-correlation headline.
Context reviewed
In context
Spoilers for xkcdShow the scene
This is the hover text of xkcd #552, "Correlation", written and drawn by Randall Munroe and posted on 6 March 2009. In the strip itself a man tells a woman he used to think correlation implied causation, until he took a statistics class; she says the class sounds like it helped, and he allows that maybe it did. The joke lives in the title text that appears when a reader rests the cursor on the image: correlation does not prove causation, but it waggles its eyebrows suggestively and mouths "look over there".
Sources (2)
- xkcd JSON feed, comic 552alt field; year 2009, month 3, day 6Reference checked
- explain xkcd, 552: CorrelationExplanation sectionReference checked
Context reviewed
