Regarding the psychology of why people overestimate the correlation-causation link, I was just recently reading this, and something vaguely relevant struck my eye:

Later, Johnson-Laird put forward the theory that individuals reason by carrying out three fundamental steps [21]:

1. They imagine a state of affairs in which the premises are true – i.e. they construct a mental model of them.

2. They formulate, if possible, an informative conclusion true in the model.

3. They check for an alternative model of the premises in which the putative conclusion is false.

If there is no such model, then the conclusion is a valid inference from the premises.

Johnson-Laird and Steedman implemented the theory in a computer program that made deductions from singly-quantified assertions, and its predictions about the relative difficulty of such problems were strikingly confirmed: the greater the number of models that have to be constructed in order to draw the correct conclusion, the harder the task [25]. Johnson-Laird concluded [22] that comprehension is a process of constructing a mental model, and set out his theory in an influential book [23]. Since then he has applied the idea to reasoning about Boolean circuitry [3] and to reasoning in modal logic [24].