Hey what’s up guys! Kathy Gibbens here…let’s start off with a quick review of a fallacy we’ve covered earlier this season, the Appeal to Emotion.
Because most people don’t know how to think well, they are easily manipulated by their emotions. When someone tries to manipulate you through your emotions, this is called an Appeal to Emotion. An Appeal to Emotion is when someone tries to get you to think, believe or behave in a certain way by manipulating your emotions rather than by presenting a logical argument.
the Question to ask yourself if you’re facing an Appeal to Emotion: “Is what they’re saying being backed up by a real argument or are they just trying to play on my emotions?”
If you want to review or hear more about this fallacy, check out Episode 23.
Alright, let’s dive into today’s fallacy, the Anecdotal Fallacy. People commit the Anecdotal Fallacy when they base a conclusion on a personal experience or on a very small sample size rather than looking at the actual evidence or using a good argument.
For example, someone will say, “Chihuahuas are vicious, dangerous animals. I used to live next door to a family who had a Chihuahua and he bit me!” Ok, so this person’s experience is real & valid, but they’re creating a conclusion off of 1 personal experience. Just b/c the Chihuahua next door when you were a kid was mean doesn’t mean all Chihuahuas are vicious & dangerous.
Or someone could say, “I’ve never seen a marriage that was happy and didn’t end in divorce. Marriage is just a bad idea that doesn’t work.” So, this person is basing a conclusion off of their limited experience of however many marriages they’ve been around rather than actually looking at the stats of marriages as a whole. They might come to a very different conclusion if they realized that there are absolutely happy marriages out there, and plenty of them!
The problem with the thinking here is that we can make opinions and conclusions that are flat-out wrong, but we’ll think they’re right. And even worse, typically, we’re not very open to having those opinions challenged. When people commit the Anecdotal Fallacy, they typically don’t want to see any data that shows anything to the contrary of what their opinion is…in fact it can be incredibly difficult, if not impossible to change their minds.
What’s really interesting is that this is one of the really common fallacies. It happens so often b/c of how our brains work. Our brains are inherently lazy…or another way to say it would be efficient. Our brains prefer to do less work rather than do more work, so they’ll look for the easy way out when it’s available. In this case, the brain prefers the simple, easy example that it didn’t have to work for over the more complicated answers that it will have to work hard to find in data or by reading stats or researching several sources.
One place you’ll commonly see Anecdotal Fallacies is in advertisements and marketing. Think of how many diet or weight loss or fitness commercials you’ve seen with some celebrity or nice-looking person saying something along the lines of, “I used the GetTrimSuperQuick system for 2 weeks and I lost 87 pounds…try it - it works!” Obviously, I’m exaggerating, but you get the point. They’ll use one person’s experience to try to convince you to buy it b/c it will work for you too. By the way, this is a good example of Fallacy stacking, meaning one statement could have several fallacies! In this example, not only is it an Anecdotal Fallacy, it’s also Appeal to Authority or Celebrity and Snob Appeal, which I haven't even gotten to yet in the podcast!
Another marketing version of the Anecdotal Fallacy is in the use of Testimonies. People LOVE testimonies! Like LOVE them. I’ve read studies where they’ve found that people trust testimonies and product reviews from other people almost more than the advertisement and product description itself. Why is that? B/c we value the experience that someone else had. Even if it’s just one person’s experience, we’ll conclude that it must be good enough for us to buy also.
I do this all the time! When I’m online shopping, I definitely read the testimonies and use that as a strong basis for making my decision to buy or not! Interestingly, the FTC has begun cracking down on online testimonies! Let’s say a company gets 10 testimonies. 4 are glowing, 5-star testimonies that make the company or their product sound amazing, 3 are 3-star testimonies that are just ok, and 3 are 1-star testimonies from people who are very dissatisfied with the company or the product. What most companies will do is they’ll only put the glowing 5-star testimonies on their website! This way, the consumer reads these glowing testimonies and assumes everybody just loves this company or product so they feel more comfortable trying it. Well, the government is now saying that companies have to include an even sample of testimonies on their website showing the range of experience their customers have had. Lol…isn’t that interesting!?
Anyways, the Question to ask yourself if you’re facing an Anecdotal Fallacy is this: “Is that really true or is it just an isolated event or experience?”… *repeat*
Remember: When you learn HOW to think, you will no longer fall prey to those who are trying to tell you what THEY want you to think and it all starts with asking one simple question: “Is that really true?”
