<\/p>\n
This fallacy occurs when your opponent over-simplifies or misrepresents your argument (i.e., setting up a “straw man”) to make it easier to attack or refute. Instead of fully addressing your actual<\/i> argument, speakers relying on this fallacy present a superficially similar — but ultimately not equal — version of your real stance, helping them create the illusion of easily defeating you.<\/p>\n John:<\/strong> I think we should hire someone to redesign our website.<\/em><\/p>\n Lola:<\/strong> You’re saying we should throw our money away on external resources instead of building up our in-house design team? That’s going to hurt our company in the long run.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Just because a significant population of people believe a proposition is true, doesn’t automatically make it true. Popularity alone is not enough to validate an argument, though it’s often used as a standalone justification of validity. Arguments in this style don’t take into account whether or not the population validating the argument is actually qualified to do so, or if contrary evidence exists.<\/p>\n While most of us expect to see bandwagon arguments in advertising (e.g., “three out of four people think X brand toothpaste cleans teeth best”), this fallacy can easily sneak it’s way into everyday meetings and conversations.<\/p>\n The majority of people believe advertisers should spend more money on billboards, so billboards are objectively the best form of advertisement.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n While appeals to authority are by no means always fallacious, they can quickly become dangerous when you rely too heavily on the opinion of a single person — especially if that person is attempting to validate something outside of their expertise.<\/p>\n Getting an authority figure to back your proposition can be a powerful addition to an existing<\/i> argument, but it can’t be the pillar your entire argument rests on. Just because someone in a position of power believes something to be true, doesn’t make it true.<\/p>\n Despite the fact that our Q4 numbers are much lower than usual, we should push forward using the same strategy because our CEO Barbara says this is the best approach.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This common fallacy misleads by presenting complex issues in terms of two inherently opposed sides. Instead of acknowledging that most (if not all) issues can be thought of on a spectrum of possibilities and stances, the false dilemma fallacy asserts that there are only two mutually exclusive outcomes.<\/p>\n This fallacy is particularly problematic because it can lend false credence to extreme stances, ignoring opportunities for compromise or chances to re-frame the issue in a new way.<\/p>\n We can either agree with Barbara’s plan, or just let the project fail. There is no other option.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This fallacy occurs when someone draws expansive conclusions based on inadequate or insufficient evidence. In other words, they jump to conclusions about the validity of a proposition with some — but not enough — evidence to back it up, and\u00a0overlook potential counterarguments.<\/p>\n Two members of my team have become more engaged employees after taking\u00a0public speaking classes. That proves we should have mandatory public speaking classes for the whole company to improve employee engagement.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Slothful induction is the exact inverse of the hasty generalization fallacy above. This fallacy occurs when sufficient logical evidence strongly indicates a particular conclusion is true, but someone fails to acknowledge it, instead attributing the outcome to coincidence or something unrelated entirely.<\/p>\n Even though every project Brad\u00a0has managed in the last two years has run way behind schedule, I still think we can chalk it up to unfortunate circumstances, not his project management skills.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n If two things appear to be correlated, this doesn’t necessarily indicate that one of those things irrefutably caused<\/i> the other thing. This might seem like an obvious\u00a0fallacy to spot, but it can be challenging to catch in practice — particularly when you really<\/i> want to find a correlation between two points of data to prove your point.<\/p>\n Our blog views were down in April. We also changed the color of our blog header in April. This means that changing the color of the blog header led to less views in April.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In place of logical evidence, this fallacy substitutes examples from someone’s personal experience. Arguments that rely heavily on anecdotal evidence tend to overlook the fact that one (possibly isolated) example can’t stand alone as definitive proof of a greater premise.<\/p>\n One of our clients doubled their conversions after changing all their landing page text to bright red. Therefore, changing all text to red is a proven way to double conversions.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This fallacy gets its colorful name from an anecdote about a\u00a0Texan who fires his gun at a barn wall, and then proceeds to paint a target around the closest cluster of bullet holes. He then points at the bullet-riddled target as evidence of his expert marksmanship.<\/p>\n Speakers\u00a0who rely on the Texas sharpshooter fallacy tend to cherry-pick data clusters\u00a0based on a predetermined conclusion. Instead of letting a full spectrum of evidence lead them to a logical conclusion, they find patterns and correlations in\u00a0support of their goals, and ignore evidence that contradicts them or suggests the clusters weren’t actually statistically significant.<\/p>\n Lisa sold her first startup to an influential tech company, so she must be a successful entrepreneur. (She ignores the fact that four of her startups have failed since then.)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This fallacy assumes\u00a0that a compromise between two extreme conflicting points is always true. Arguments of this style ignore the possibility that\u00a0one or both of the extremes could be completely true or false — rendering\u00a0any form of compromise between the two invalid as well.<\/p>\n Lola thinks the best way to improve conversions is to redesign the entire company website,\u00a0but John is firmly against making any changes to the website. Therefore, the best\u00a0approach is to redesign some portions of the website.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n If a person claims that X is true, it is their responsibility to provide evidence in support of that assertion. It is invalid to claim that X is true until someone else can prove that X is not<\/em> true. Similarly, it is also invalid to claim that X is true because it’s impossible to prove that X is false.<\/p>\n In other words, just because there is no evidence presented against something, that doesn’t automatically make that thing true.<\/p>\n Barbara believes\u00a0the marketing agency’s office is haunted, since no one has ever proven that it <\/i>isn’t haunted.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n If you have difficulty understanding how or why something is true, that doesn’t automatically mean the thing in question is false. A personal or collective lack of understanding isn’t enough to render a claim invalid.<\/p>\n I don’t understand how redesigning our\u00a0website\u00a0resulted in more conversions, so\u00a0there must have been another factor at play.\u00a0<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Often\u00a0used to protect assertions that rely on universal generalizations (like “all Marketers love pie”) this fallacy inaccurately deflects counterexamples to a claim by changing the positioning or conditions of the original claim to exclude the counterexample.<\/p>\n In other words, instead of acknolwedging that a counterexample to their original claim exists, the speaker ammends the terms of the claim. In the example below, when Barabara presents a valid counterexample to John’s claim, John changes the terms of his claim to exclude Barbara’s counterexample.<\/p>\n John:<\/strong> No marketer would ever put two call-to-actions on a single landing page.<\/i><\/p>\n Barbara:<\/strong> Lola, a marketer, actually found great success putting two call-to-actions on a single landing page for our last campaign.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n John:<\/strong> Well, no\u00a0true marketer would put two call-to-actions on a single landing page, so Lola must not be a <\/i>true marketer.\u00a0<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The tu quoque<\/em> fallacy (Latin for “you also”) is an invalid\u00a0attempt to discredit an opponent by answering criticism with criticism — but never actually\u00a0presenting a counterargument to the original disputed claim.<\/p>\n In\u00a0the example below, Lola\u00a0makes a claim. Instead of presenting evidence against Lola’s claim, John\u00a0levels a claim against Lola. This attack doesn’t actually help John\u00a0succeed in proving Lola\u00a0wrong, since he doesn’t address her original claim in any capacity.<\/p>\n Lola:<\/strong>\u00a0I don’t think John would be a good fit to manage this project, because he doesn’t have a lot of experience with project management.<\/i><\/p>\n John:<\/strong>\u00a0But you don’t have a lot of experience in project management either!<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Here’s something vital to keep in mind when sniffing out fallacies: just because someone’s argument relies on a fallacy doesn’t necessarily mean that their claim\u00a0is inherently untrue.<\/p>\n Making a fallacy-riddled claim\u00a0doesn’t automatically invalidate<\/i> the premise of the argument\u00a0— it just means the argument doesn’t actually validate<\/i> their premise. In other words,\u00a0their argument sucks, but they aren’t necessarily wrong.<\/p>\n John’s argument in favor of redesigning the company website clearly relied heavily on cherry-picked statistics in support of his\u00a0claim, so Lola decided that redesigning the website must not be a good decision.\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 15 Common Logical Fallacies 1) The Straw Man Fallacy This fallacy occurs when your opponent over-simplifies or misrepresents your argument (i.e., setting up a “straw man”) to make it easier to attack or refute. Instead of fully addressing your actual argument, speakers relying on More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15594,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[96],"tags":[163],"class_list":["post-15593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-resources","tag-163"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/jolineblais.net\/nmd200\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/lights2.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pahVQP-43v","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jolineblais.net\/nmd200\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jolineblais.net\/nmd200\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jolineblais.net\/nmd200\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jolineblais.net\/nmd200\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jolineblais.net\/nmd200\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15593"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jolineblais.net\/nmd200\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15630,"href":"https:\/\/jolineblais.net\/nmd200\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15593\/revisions\/15630"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jolineblais.net\/nmd200\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jolineblais.net\/nmd200\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jolineblais.net\/nmd200\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jolineblais.net\/nmd200\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Example:<\/h4>\n
2) The Bandwagon Fallacy<\/h3>\n
Example:<\/h4>\n
3) The Appeal to Authority Fallacy<\/h3>\n
Example:<\/h4>\n
4) The False Dilemma Fallacy<\/h3>\n
Example:<\/h4>\n
5) The Hasty Generalization Fallacy<\/h3>\n
Example:<\/h4>\n
6) The Slothful Induction Fallacy<\/h3>\n
Example:<\/h4>\n
7) The Correlation\/Causation Fallacy<\/h3>\n
Example:<\/h4>\n
8) The Anecdotal Evidence Fallacy<\/h3>\n
Example:<\/h4>\n
9) The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy<\/h3>\n
Example:<\/h4>\n
10) The Middle Ground Fallacy<\/h3>\n
Example:<\/h4>\n
11) The Burden of Proof Fallacy<\/h3>\n
Example:<\/h4>\n
12) The Personal Incredulity Fallacy<\/h3>\n
Example:<\/h4>\n
13) The “No True Scotsman” Fallacy<\/h3>\n
Example:<\/h4>\n
14) The Tu<\/em>\u00a0quoque<\/i> Fallacy<\/h3>\n
Example:<\/h4>\n
15) The Fallacy Fallacy<\/h3>\n
Example:<\/h4>\n