What's the meaning of "more likely"?

get that 173

I'm seeing a lot of LR questions worded with statements like "more likely" or "less likely."

e.g. people with university degrees are more likely to have dogs than cats

Can I interpret this sentence as university degree (positively CORR) dogs? Is there a better way to understand more likely/less likely sentences? Thanks in advance!

GSU Hopeful

I could be wrong so please correct me someone if I am. Likely is an abstract term and adding more or less just adds to that. I interpret more likely as greater than a 50% chance of something happening and less likely as less than 50% chance of it happening. When used as a comparison such as the one in your example, people with degrees stand more than a 50% chance to have dogs than cats. There's a greater possibility of them having dogs than having cats.

help

EveryCookCanGovern

GSU is right. Likely is one of those statements where at first it doesn't look like it represents "51% or greater" but it does. So: people with university degrees have 51% or greater chance of having dogs than cats. And yes it is also a correlation.