It is natural for people to observe happenings and then seek explanations for why those happenings occurred. But sometimes the reasoning is wrong because of one or more misconceptions. One of these is the ecological fallacy, where an argument claims that there is a causal relationship between two things merely because they occur together. For example, in the 1950s it was found that crime rates were the highest in neighborhoods where immigrants were most numerous. Some people used this "co-occurrence" to argue that immigrants were a cause of crime. But a careful analysis of this situation revealed that immigrants were forced to live in neighborhoods where crime rates were already high; they could not afford more expensive housing in safer neighborhoods. Immigrants themselves committed very few of the crimes. Unless you analyze the claim carefully, you would misinterpret the relationship and thereby construct a faulty belief.