Frank: “Ben is conservative.”

Dan: “How do you know that?”

Frank: “Because Ben mentioned that he’s not liberal.”

If you were to hear the above conversation, you might suspect something wrong. But what is wrong in the above conversation? Frank commits an error in reasoning—a fallacy.

You can tell it’s a fallacy because even if it’s true that Ben isn’t a liberal, it still doesn’t follow that Ben is a conservative. Ben might be neither liberal nor conservative. Yet Frank overlooks this possibility. He simply assumes that if you’re not one you must be the other. That’s an error in reasoning.

That error is called a false dichotomy (it’s also known as a false dilemma, either-or fallacy, or fallacy of false alternatives). False dichotomy assumes that there are only two possibilities when there are more.

For example, Frank reasons as follows:

Premise 1: Ben is a conservative, or Ben is a liberal.

Premise 2: Ben is not a liberal.

Conclusion: Therefore, Ben is a conservative.

The problem with Frank’s reasoning is that Premise 1 is false. Liberal and conservative aren’t the only two options. Ben could be a centrist. Or Ben might not occupy any position on the political spectrum at all. Frank overlooks the possibilities. As a result, Ben’s reasoning commits an error.

False dichotomy assumes that there are only two distinct alternatives, and omits any other alternatives.

How to detect false dichotomy?

Ask yourself, can there be at least one more alternative? So the argument would look like this:

Premise 1: Ben is a conservative, or Ben is a liberal, or Ben is a centrist, or Ben occupies no position on the political spectrum at all.

Premise 2: Ben is not a liberal.

Fallacious Conclusion: Therefore, Ben is a conservative.

When we present Frank’s argument this way, we see that his conclusion doesn’t follow. What does follow is instead this:

Real Conclusion: Therefore, Ben is a conservative, or Ben is a centrist, or Ben occupies no position on the political spectrum at all.

Frank falsely assumed that there are only two possibilities, when more than two existed. He ignores those other possibilities, and as a result, his conclusion doesn’t follow.

Illustration below shows how Frank only uses two extremes of the political spectrum:

Frank only presents P1 and P5, and omits other alternatives.

P1 : Far Left

P2 : Left

P3 : Center

P4 : Right

P5 : Far Right

Examples of false dichotomy in everyday life:

Claim: Technology is either destroying society, or it's the solution to all our problems.

Explanation: This claim assumes that technology is entirely beneficial or entirely harmful. It ignores the fact that technology can have both positive and negative impacts.

Claim: You are either with us, or against us.

Explanation: The claim ignores a neutral position, partial support, etc.

Claim: Either we ban all immigration, or we open our borders.

Explanation: The claim ignores regulated immigration policies.

As you can see from the above examples, often when you encounter false dichotomy, the only two options that get presented are extremes on what is in fact a wide-ranging spectrum encompassing many alternatives between the two extremes.

Why do people fall for false dichotomies?

There are several reasons but let’s focus on two main reasons: First, most people are not trained to think beyond two possibilities. Second, most people want oversimplification, and false dichotomy is an attempt (knowingly or unknowingly) to simplify a much more complicated claim.

Caution about dichotomy vs false dichotomy

When we use the word “dichotomy,” we mean that there is a division between two things that are mutually exclusive. Not all dichotomies are false. Sometimes there really are only two possibilities. Let's look at an example where a dichotomy is true:

Premise 1: Ben is either dead or alive.

Premise 2: Ben is not dead.

Conclusion: Ben is alive.

False dichotomy is a common fallacy that is often seen in politics, marketing, and everyday conversations. Understanding what a false dichotomy will give you a tool to detect and disarm it.

Manuel: “If we are late, then the train will leave the station.” 

Pablo: “We are late.”  

Manuel: “The train will leave the station.”

Manuel and Pablo used modus ponens, a fundamental form of logical argument that shows up in everyday discussions. Modus ponens can help us understand others' arguments, and form our own arguments. 

In order to understand modus ponens, let’s go over the basic concepts of argument. 

What is an argument? 

An argument is a series of statements that try to prove a point. The statements can be either true or false. The statement that the arguer tries to prove is called the conclusion. The statements that try to prove the conclusion are called premises.

Difference between argument, and valid argument

If you put a series of statements together, then you make an argument.

Premise: P

Conclusion: Therefore, Q

Above is an example of something that counts as an argument since it has a premise and a conclusion. That’s all it takes for something to be an argument, but it doesn’t make it a valid argument. 

When we say an argument is valid, we are talking about an argument’s form. If we plug true premises into a valid form, it guarantees a true conclusion. A valid form is similar to an accurate math formula. For example, if you want to get the area of a circle, you will use the formula “A = π (r)^2.” Then, all you need to do is plug the accurate radius of the circle into the formula to get an accurate area.

The values we plug in for the variables in a math formula are numbers. By contrast, the values we plug in for the variables in a logic argument are statements. Let’s look at modus ponens’ form:

​​Premise 1: If P then Q

Premise 2: P

Conclusion: Therefore, Q

In the above form, ‘P’ and ‘Q’ are variables for statements, and ‘if...then…’ is a logical operator called a conditional. Modus ponens is a valid form of argument. 

Let’s plug statements into modus ponens to demonstrate that if the premises of a valid argument are true, then the argument is guaranteed a true conclusion. When an argument has a valid form(like modus ponens), and all the premises are true, it is called a sound argument. 

Let’s suppose P is “It is raining,” and Q is “The street is wet.” The result is the following argument: 

Premise 1: If it is raining, then the street is wet.

Premise 2: It is raining.

Conclusion: Therefore, the street is wet.

In our above example, if the premises of the argument are true, then it’s impossible for the conclusion of the argument to be false. 

How to detect modus ponens in conversations?

Often in conversations, modus ponens can look different than what we discussed above. Just like when you encounter a math problem, in order to solve it, you put it into an equation. Likewise, when you encounter an argument, in order to evaluate it, you put it into a valid form. Here are a couple of examples:

CEO using modus ponens: “I’ve said this before that if we increase our sales by 20% by the end of the year, everyone is going to get a bonus. And today, we have hit our sales target. Everyone gets a bonus”. 

Premise 1: If we increase our sales by 20% by the end of the year, then everyone gets a bonus. 

Premise 2: We increased our sales by 20% by the end of the year. 

Conclusion: Therefore, everyone gets a bonus. 

Your friend using modus ponens: “I’ll give you $100 if you can put this argument into modus ponens.”

Your response: 

Premise 1: If I put this argument into modus ponens, then I get $100. 

Premise 2: I put this argument into modus ponens. 

Conclusion: Therefore, I get $100. 

Modus ponens achieved. Where’s my money?

Recognizing modus ponens in conversation is a crucial skill for critical thinking. By mastering this form of reasoning, you can better analyze arguments, make informed decisions, and articulate your own ideas well.

An argument is a series of statements that try to prove a point. The statement that the arguer tries to prove is called the conclusion. The statements that try to prove the conclusion are called premises. 

Here’s a sample argument:

Premise 1: If it is raining, then the street is wet.

Premise 2: It is raining. 

Conclusion: Therefore, the street is wet.

Above is an example of a series of statements that counts as an argument since it has a premise and conclusion. That’s all it takes for something to be an argument: it needs to have a premise and a conclusion. 

A sound argument proves the arguer’s point by providing decisive evidence for the truth of their conclusion. 

A sound argument has two features: 

1. The argument has a valid form, and 

2. All the premises are true.

I’m going to talk about these points in order. To understand the valid form, we need to understand the logical form of an argument and the logical form of a statement.

What Is an Argument’s Logical Form?

When we say an argument is valid, we are talking about an argument’s logical form. I wrote about valid arguments and logical forms in this piece here in detail.

Logical forms are like math formulas. Each comprises variables and operators. For example, the math formula “x + x = 2x” comprises a variable ‘x’ and an operator ‘+’. If we were to plug in the value 1 for x, then we would get “1+1 = 2.” Logical forms are similar. The difference is that instead of mathematical operators, logical forms use logical operators, and instead of variables that are filled in with numbers, the variables of logical forms are filled in with statements. 

How do you get at the form of an argument? An argument is a series of statements, so to get at the form of an argument, you need to get at the form of the statements that compose it. 

The Logical Form of a Statement

Here are a couple of examples of statements: “It is raining.”; “The street is wet.”

Statements can be combined using logical operators such as the following:

• Not

• Both… and…

• Either… or…

• If… then…

• … if and only if…

When we combine two or more statements using logical operators, the result is a compound statement. 

For example, the statements, “It is raining,” and, “The street is wet,” can be combined by the logical operator ‘and’ to make a compound statement as follows: “It is raining, and the street is wet.” Or they can be combined using ‘if…then…’ as follows: “If it is raining, then the street is wet.”

Here are more examples of statements formed with logical operators: “It is not raining,” “James is tall, or Adam is fast,” “Either you can go straight, or you can make a right,” “Shawn can win the race if and only if he enters it.” 

Now that we understand the logical form of a statement, let’s talk about the logical form of an argument. An argument is composed of statements. The premises and the conclusion of an argument are all statements. So if you want to know the logical form of an argument, you start by identifying the logical form of the statements composing it.

Here’s an example of an argument: 

Premise 1: All mammals are animals.

Premise 2: All dogs are mammals.

Conclusion: Therefore, all dogs are animals.

Here’s the form of the argument:

All M are A 

All D are M 

Therefore, all D are A 

Logicians have a name for this form of argument. It is a valid deductive argument called a categorical syllogism. 

Now, an argument’s form is valid if and only if the truth of the argument’s premises guarantees the truth of its conclusion. If we plug in true premises, in other words, a valid form guarantees a true conclusion. 

A valid form is similar to an accurate math formula. For example, in mathematics, if you want to get the area of a circle, you will first get the formula to calculate the area of a circle. In this case, the formula will be “A = π (r)^2.” At this point, all you need to do is plug in the radius r of the circle in the formula to get an accurate result. If you get the accurate radius, then you are guaranteed an accurate area.

The categorical syllogism is a valid form because if the two premises are true then the conclusion has to be true. In other words, if premises 1 and 2 are true, then the conclusion (All dogs are animals) has to be true–it’s impossible for it to be false.

Now that we’ve talked about forms of statements and arguments, let’s talk about what it means for an argument to be a sound argument. 

What makes a valid argument into a sound argument?

Now that we understand what a valid argument is, it is easier to understand a sound argument. An argument is sound if and only if it is a valid argument and all the premises are true. Examples of sound arguments include categorical syllogisms whose premises are all true.

In order to determine whether an argument is sound, you need to ask the following two questions.

1. Does this argument have a valid form?

2. Are all the premises true?

Once the answer to both 1 and 2 is yes, then you know it’s a sound argument. 

The following argument is another example of categorical syllogism: 

Premise 1: All men are mortal. 

Premise 2: Socrates is a man.

Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Let’s look at the above example with two questions in mind to determine whether this argument is sound.

Does this argument has a valid form? Yes. The above form is called a categorical syllogism, and it is a valid form. Logicians have compiled a list of time-tested valid argument forms such as Modus ponens, Modus tollens, and Disjunctive syllogism. Categorical syllogism is one of the most popular forms, and it is a valid form because if the two premises are true then the conclusion has to be true.

Are all the premises true? Yes. Both of the premises above are true. Premises are statements. Statements can be either true or false. A statement is true when the world matches the statement. If I were to say, “2 plus 2 is 4,” then this statement is true since it matches how the world is. If I were to say, “2 plus 2 is 5,” then this statement is false since it doesn’t match how the world is.

If you can’t determine whether the premises are true or false, you can choose to withhold judgment. Withholding judgment means you don’t make a decision to accept or reject a claim. For example, suppose you don’t have decisive evidence for or against this claim: “There is life outside of the earth.” You don’t have to make a decision about whether or not the claim is true. You can withhold your judgment till you get more evidence for or against the claim. 

If the answer to questions 1 and 2 is yes, then you know that the above argument is sound. You know that the argument actually proves its point. It actually proves that the conclusion is true.

However, if the answer to question 1 is yes, and you’re withholding judgment about question 2, then at least you know that the argument is a valid argument even if you don’t know whether the argument is sound.

Summary and Conclusion of Sound Argument

• An argument is a series of statements that try to prove a point. The statement that the arguer tries to prove is called the conclusion. The statements that try to prove the conclusion are called premises.

• Arguments are not true or false. Statements are true or false.

• When we say an argument is valid, we are talking about the form of an argument.

• An argument is valid if and only if the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion.

• Validity is a feature of deductive arguments not inductive arguments.

• Logicians have tests for logical consequence and methods for constructing valid deductive arguments.  

• An argument is sound if and only if it is a valid argument and all the premises are true.

• Unsound arguments either don’t have a valid form or they have at least one false premise.

• If the premises of an argument are false, then the argument doesn’t prove anything. An argument with even a single false premise doesn’t prove anything.

• Knowing how to identify sound arguments is essential to developing critical thinking skills.

• Not all invalid forms are fallacies. Inductive arguments are invalid arguments, but they aren’t fallacies. If inductive arguments have true premises, they still give us some reason to think their conclusions are true. They just don’t prove their conclusions. An inductive argument with true premises can still have a false conclusion; it’s just that the conclusion is probably true. An inductive argument with true premises is sometimes called a cogent argument. 

Confirmation bias is a tendency to consider information that confirms what you already believe and that doesn’t challenge it. The American Psychological Association defines it this way: 

“the tendency to gather evidence that confirms preexisting expectations, typically by emphasizing or pursuing supporting evidence while dismissing or failing to seek contradictory evidence.”

Numerous experimental studies in social psychology have shown confirmation bias to be a common psychological bias, like attribution bias or the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Here’s an example. Suppose you hear about inflation in the US economy. You notice that there are two positions about it: 

1. Inflation is transitory due to the COVID pandemic;

2. Inflation is already here and ramping. 

Suppose that you are going to believe one of the two claims. If you are like most people, you have a tendency to favor information that confirms what you already believe and that doesn’t challenge it. 

One option is to seek pieces of information that confirm that inflation is transitory. You go to your browser and type, “Is inflation transitory due to the COVID pandemic?” and then you go on to read many sources that agree that inflation is transitory due to the COVID pandemic. You continue seeking more confirmation that inflation is transitory from your family, friends, and social network. And you avoid any sources that challenge this view. 

Another option is to seek pieces of information that confirm that inflation is already here. You go to your browser and type, “Is inflation already here and ramping?” and then you go on to read every source that agrees that inflation is already here and ramping. You continue seeking more confirmation that inflation is already here from your family, friends, and social media. And you avoid any sources that challenge this view. 

In both of the above cases, you are only seeking sources that confirm what you already believe. You don’t want to challenge your own belief about inflation. The tendency to look at only the sources that confirm your own beliefs is an example of confirmation bias.  

Confirmation bias is often what drives people to accept even the most absurd conspiracy theories. For example, my friend Josh believes that the species Bigfoot exists. Bigfoot is supposed to be a kind of animal living in the woods that looks half-human and half-chimp. Josh’s reason for believing that Bigfoot exists is based on two anecdotes. One night his friend, Steve, was driving around the woods at 2 am, and Steve saw something that he believed was Bigfoot. Later when Josh and Steve went to ask the local Native Americans, the locals forbade them from saying the word ‘Bigfoot’ because, they said, people who utter the word ‘Bigfoot’ have Bigfoot appear in their lives. After those two events, Josh declared that Bigfoot is real.

My friend Josh didn’t consider any information that would counter the belief that Bigfoot exists. For example, Josh never considered that we’ve never found remains of Bigfoot even though we’ve found remains of dinosaurs from millions of years ago. In addition, if it were true that uttering the name ‘Bigfoot’ were to bring Bigfoot in your life, then Josh and Steve could have sat in the woods with their guns and uttered the word ‘Bigfoot’ over and over to prompt Bigfoot to appear. Both of these considerations would have countered Josh’s belief that Bigfoot exists. But Josh wanted to believe that Bigfoot is real, and he was focused only on sources of information that supported his belief. Josh was biased. 

Something similar is true of people who believe that the earth is flat, that the moon landing was staged, or that the holocaust didn’t happen. These people step into an echo chamber to confirm their existing beliefs: when they say, “The earth is flat,” the sources they’ve surrounded themselves with echo back, “The earth is flat,” to further confirm what they believe. And the echo chamber never presents them with any sources that disconfirm their beliefs. In other words, people who endorse these views don’t want to see the world for what it is; they only want to see the world for what they want it to be.

Let’s look at another scenario. Let’s say you are looking to invest in a stock. You think that Amazon is a great investment, so you go online to find evidence to support your belief. You type into YouTube, “Amazon stock analysis,” and you watch many videos that echo back what you already believe about Amazon. YouTube is programmed to recognize viewer preferences. Now YouTube starts recommending more and more videos that further convince you that Amazon stock is going to soar. And later YouTube filters out any videos that are going to disconfirm your belief that Amazon stock is a great investment.  

It takes discipline and intellectual curiosity to find opposing viewpoints that challenge what you already believe instead of just confirming them. If you truly wanted to see Amazon stock for what it is, you would need to collect some disconfirming evidence and evaluate that evidence.

How to Detect Confirmation Bias

There’s an easy way to determine whether someone is manifesting confirmation bias. Ask them, “What are the arguments against your claim?” If they can’t answer the question, then they’re biased. For example, when I asked Josh for arguments against Bigfoot’s existence, it was clear to me that he had not sought any counterarguments.

You can ask yourself the question, “What are the arguments against my claim?” to detect the bias in yourself. Suppose you were looking to invest in Amazon stock. Ask yourself, “What are the arguments against buying Amazon stock?” If you can’t answer the question, then you’re biased.

How to Disarm Confirmation Bias 

To counteract confirmation bias, take these two steps. 

Step 1: Withhold Judgment

Withholding judgment is when you don’t make a decision about accepting or rejecting a claim. For good decision-making, you need to understand arguments both for and against a claim. You don’t make a judgment until you have looked at both sides of the claim.

By withholding judgment, you are in a position to see the claim from all angles and strengthen your commitment to knowing and understanding what’s true.

Step 2: Look for Evidence against the Claim Not Just for It.

“I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting it.” –Charlie Munger

This quote from Munger brings up a key strategy for disarming confirmation bias: you need to understand the argument against your position to avoid confirmation bias.

When you endorse a claim, you need to understand the arguments against it. For example, if I believe that Bigfoot exists, then I need to explore the arguments against my belief. I can start by asking some questions like these: If Bigfoot exists, then where are the Bigfoot remains? How come so many people utter the word ‘Bigfoot’ but he doesn’t appear? Answering these questions can get me thinking about possible arguments against Bigfoot’s existence.  

Disciplining yourself in the way Munger describes is a way to disarm confirmation bias. When you believe a claim, you need to look for contradictory evidence–i.e. evidence that disconfirms your pre-existing belief, not just evidence that confirms it. The impact of confirmation bias on your day-to-day life are numerous because confirmation bias affects cognition and how you process information. Among other things, focusing only on confirmatory evidence can lead to overconfidence in the accuracy of your beliefs. It can also distort your memories: even when people explore evidence that contradicts their beliefs, they tend only to recall information that confirms their beliefs. In addition, when people experience cognitive dissonance (that is, when they encounter evidence that contradicts their pre-existing beliefs), they tend to dismiss that evidence in favor of evidence that confirms those beliefs.

A wisdom seeker is committed to knowing and understanding what’s true, and that involves managing cognitive biases because the latter distort our knowledge and understanding. 

Do you ever listen to someone’s argument and think that it makes sense, and all the ideas are connected, but you don’t know why? Well-crafted arguments need to have certain ingredients, and those ingredients in an argument make sense to us.

Sometimes that “makes sense” feeling is a recognition that an argument is valid. The definition of a valid argument is this: if the premises are true, then it’s impossible for the conclusion to be false. In other words, a valid argument actually proves that its conclusion is true. 

If you really want to understand in detail what this definition means, you first have to take the time to understand in detail what an argument is, and that means also understanding what statements are.

What is an argument? 

An argument is a series of statements that try to prove a point. The statement that the arguer tries to prove is called the conclusion. The statements that try to prove the conclusion are called premises.

Statements can be either true or false. A statement is true when the world matches the statement. If I were to say, “2 plus 2 is 4,” then this statement is true since it matches how the world is. If I were to say, “2 plus 2 is 5,” then this statement is false since it doesn’t match how the world is.

Statements can be combined using logical operators such as ‘not’, ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘If...then’, and, ‘if and only if.’ When we combine two or more statements using logical operators, the result is a compound statement. 

For example, the statements, “Peter is a man,” and, “Quinn is a woman,” can be combined using the logical operator ‘and’ to make a compound statement as follows: “Peter is a man, and Quinn is a woman.” Or they can be combined using ‘if and only if’ as follows: “Peter is a man if and only if Quinn is a woman.”

Here are more examples of statements formed with logical operators: “Ben is not a woman,” “James is tall, or Adam is fast,” “Either you can go straight, or you can make a right,” “If you are tired, then you will make mistakes,” “Shawn can win the race if and only if he enters it.” 

What are logical forms?

Validity is a type of logical form. Logical forms are like math formulas. Each comprises variables and operators. For example, the math formula “x + x = 2x” comprises a variable ‘x’ and an operator ‘+’. If we were to plug in the value 1 for x, then we would get “1+1 = 2.” Logical forms are similar. The difference is that instead of mathematical operators, logical forms use logical operators, and instead of variables that are filled in with numbers, the variables of logical forms are filled in with statements. 

Let’s use these symbols to represent logical operators:

Further, we can also use symbols to represent statements:

Using these symbols provides a convenient shorthand for representing different kinds of statements. For example, we can represent the statement, “Ben is not a woman,” using the symbol ‘~B’. That is, we use the negation operator ~ together with the variable ‘B’ which represents the statement, “Ben is a woman.”

We can represent the statement, “James is tall, and Adam is fast,” using the symbol ‘J & A’-- that is, using the conjunction operator & together with the variables ‘J’ and ‘A’ which represent the statements, “James is tall,” and, “Adam is fast,” respectively.

We can represent the statement “Either you can go straight, or you can make a right,” using the symbol ‘S V R’-- that is, using the disjunction operator V and the variable ‘S’ and ‘R’ which represent the statements, “You can go straight,” and, “You can make a right.”

These symbolic representations give us the logical forms of the statements. The form of a statement is like a math formula: it comprises variables and operators. For example, the math formula “x + x = 2x” comprises a variable ‘x’ and an operator ‘+’. If we were to plug in the value 1 for x, then we would get “1+1 = 2.” 

Likewise, if we were to use the logical form “T => M,” then ‘T’ and ‘M’ are our variables and ‘=>’ is our logical operator. If we were to plug in the value “You are tired” for T, and the value “You will make mistakes” for M, then we would get “If you are tired, then you will make mistakes.”

Compound statements and truth tables

When we combine statements using logical operators, the truth of the compound statement is determined by the truth of its component statements. That determination relation is represented on a truth table. For example, this is the truth table for the conjunction operator: 

A truth table is a tool that allows us to determine whether the compound statement is true by looking at its component statements. It shows us how the truth value of the compound statement is determined by the truth values of its component statements.

Let’s look at the first line of the truth table: If we assume P is true and Q is true, then the entire compound statement P & Q is true. Combining two true statements using the conjunction operator results in a true compound statement. 

Let’s look at the second line of the truth table: If we assume P is true and Q is false, then P & Q is false. Combining one true statement and one false statement using the conjunction operator results in a false compound statement. 

Let’s look at the third line of the truth table: If we assume P is false and Q is true, then P & Q is false. Combining one false statement and one true statement using the conjunction operator results in a false compound statement. 

Let’s look at the fourth line of the truth table: If we assume P is false and Q is false, then P & Q is false. Combining two false statements using the conjunction operator results in a false compound statement.   

Just like the conjunction operator, all the other logical operators have their own truth tables:

The truth table for negation

The truth table for disjunction

The truth table for conditional

The truth table for biconditional

Now that we understand what the logical form of a statement is and how to use truth tables to determine the truth or falsity of a compound statement, we’re ready to consider what the form of an argument is. 

What makes an argument’s form valid?

An argument is a series of statements, so to get at the form of an argument, you just need to get at the form of the statements that compose it. Let’s look at an example. Let’s say we have two statements: A and B. 

If we put them in order, then we make an argument.

Premise: A

Conclusion: Therefore, B

Above is an example of something that counts as an argument since it has a premise and conclusion. That’s all it takes for something to be an argument: it needs to have a premise and a conclusion. 

When we say an argument is valid, we are talking about an argument’s form. If we plug in true premises, a valid form guarantees a true conclusion. A valid form is similar to an accurate math formula. For example, in mathematics, if you want to get the area of a circle, you will first get the formula to calculate the area of a circle. In this case, the formula will be “A = π (r)^2.” At this point, all you need to do is plug in the radius r of the circle in the formula to get an accurate result. If you get the accurate radius, then you are guaranteed an accurate area.

The values we plug in for the variables in a math formula are numbers. By contrast, the values we plug in for the variables in a logic formula are statements. Let’s look at a deductive argument form that logicians call modus ponens:

​​If P then Q,

P

Therefore, Q

In the above form, ‘P’ and ‘Q’ are variables, and ‘if...then…’ is the logical operator. Modus ponens is universally regarded as a valid form of argument. 

An argument’s form is valid if and only if the truth of the argument’s premises guarantees the truth of its conclusion. A valid form is similar to an accurate math formula. Just as the formula “A = π (r)^2” guarantees an accurate area if you plug in an accurate radius, likewise, a valid form of argument guarantees you a true conclusion if you plug in values for the variables that yield true premises. In other words, if you plug in values for the variables in a valid form of argument, and the resulting premises are true, the conclusion is guaranteed to be true. If an argument is valid and it has true premises, in other words, then it’s impossible for it to have a false conclusion. 

Note: there are two categories of invalid argument: inductive arguments and fallacies. If an argument is inductive and its premises are true, then it is possible for it to have a false conclusion; it’s just that it’s unlikely that the conclusion is false if the premises are true. If, on the other hand, an argument commits a fallacy, then even if the premises are true, they still tell you nothing at all about the truth or falsity of the conclusion. (I talk more about these invalid forms of argument in another piece.) Also, an argument with a false premise is like a fallacy: it tells you nothing at all about the truth or falsity of the argument’s conclusion.

Now let’s plug in statements into modus ponens to show that if the premises of a valid argument are true, then the argument is guaranteed a true conclusion. 

Let’s suppose P is “It is raining,” and Q is “The street is wet.” The result is the following argument: 

If it is raining, then the street is wet.

It is raining.

Therefore, the street is wet.

In our above example, if the premises of the argument are true, then it’s impossible for the conclusion of the argument to be false. 

It’s possible to visualize the validity of an argument. To see this, let’s look at another example of a valid argument:

Premise 1: All mammals are animals.

Premise 2: All dogs are mammals.

Conclusion: Therefore, all dogs are animals.

Here’s the form of the argument:

All M are A 

All D are M 

Therefore, all D are A 

The above form is called a categorical syllogism, and it is a valid form. This form is valid because if the two premises are true then the conclusion has to be true.

Now that we understand what a valid argument is, it is worth mentioning what a sound argument is. An argument is sound if and only if it is a valid argument and all the premises are true. 

Some people mistakenly use the expression “true argument.” In fact, arguments cannot be true or false. The statements that we plug in the argument can be true or false. The argument has a form: valid or invalid. If the argument’s form is valid, and all the premises are true, then the argument is sound.

Learning forms of argument is an important step in developing your critical thinking skills. Once you understand the argument, the form of an argument, what a valid argument is, you’ll be able to evaluate even complex arguments since those arguments are built up by putting together many simpler ones.

Then, I hit Precalculus. 

For the first time, I was getting many things wrong. But by then, I had come to accept the self-image of being a math whiz. I couldn’t imagine being someone who didn’t understand math. So, I began pretending that I knew what I was doing. 

But you can’t do that in math. If you don’t get the right answer, you’re just wrong. That’s why math is humbling. 

My lack of understanding showed up in my midterm grades, and I ended up barely passing Precalculus. Afterward, I was still pretending to know. I blamed teachers, my school workload, and my part-time job for my struggles. I refused to accept that I didn’t understand advanced math concepts. 

I now know what was wrong. I was afraid to say three dreaded words: “I don’t know.”

Why don’t we say “I don’t know”?

I’m not the only one who has a hard time admitting that I don’t know. There are many people who don’t admit to what they don’t know. Why? What’s so scary about it?

It’s not that scary to be wrong about the subject matter—math, in my case. But it is scary to be wrong about yourself, to learn that you’re not the person you imagine yourself to be. In other words, it’s scary to admit that you don’t match your self-image.

A self-image is a description of what we think we are, want to be, or should be. Your self-image could be that you are a conservative—you wear a bow tie and think left-wing people are all out of touch with reality. Your self-image could be that you are a liberal—you wear a Bob Marley shirt and think right-wing people are out of touch with reality. In my case, my self-image was that I was a math whiz, and I wanted to appear knowledgeable. 

When we decide on a self-image, we decide to start thinking, feeling, and acting in ways that match that image. We want to match our self-image in reality. But that can take a lot of work. For example, to match my self-image as a math whiz, I needed to work hard at learning advanced math concepts. But I didn’t do that.

If you aren’t able to match your self-image you have two options:

• You pretend to live the self-image.

• You reject that self-image in favor of another.

Pretending to live the self-image

Most people who don’t match their self-image pretend. I used to do the same. I refused to admit that I was actually not a math whiz. As I advanced in the math courses, they got hard. I didn’t want to work hard at math. I wanted the advanced concepts to come easy to me. 

Instead of learning and getting better at math, I began to focus on appearing smart in math. The pretender in me would memorize the advanced concepts, but I wouldn’t understand them. Later my desire to look knowledgeable trickled into other aspects of my life. For example, when I showed up at my first job, I wanted to be known as the most knowledgeable person on the team. My self-image was that I was a knowledgeable employee, that I knew most of the things at work. So at my first job, I went around pretending to know things but barely understood them. 

My case isn’t unique. There are many people who pretend to be someone they’re not. A lot of people want to look knowledgeable as part of their self-image. That explains why they find it hard to say they don’t know: not knowing doesn’t align with their self-image. When they fail to match that self-image, they start pretending to live their self-image.

Rejecting your self-image for another

The alternative to pretending to look knowledgeable is to admit that you have a false self-image. Once you reject the false self-image, you can pick another self-image that’s more realistic. A realistic self-image allows you to actually acquire knowledge. Your new self-image could include that you don’t understand a lot of things, that you are okay with saying, “I don’t know.” 

Self-image is a big driver of how we feel, think and act. For example, if I feel, think, and act like I don’t understand advanced math concepts, then it is easy for me to say I don’t understand advanced math. When we live into that new self-image, we don’t know a lot of things, so that self-image helps us admit the things we don’t understand. 

In reality, I needed to let go of my self-image as the math whiz, and create another self-image. I created a new image of myself not as a math whiz, but as a person who wanted to know and understand math. For knowing and understanding math, I needed to know my limitations in advanced math concepts, to spend extra time understanding them, and to practice them. 

Understanding the difference between false self-images and real self-images helps us pick a self-image that enables us to know and understand what’s true. Most of the people who pretend to know a lot of things tend to have a self-deception. They don’t understand what it takes to be competent. They can’t wrap their mind around the amount of work it takes to be competent in any given field. Pretending is easy but understanding takes a lot of work. 

I had just turned 40, and for the very first time I heard the expression, “Thinking is a skill.” 

I thought, “If thinking is a skill, then how come no one ever mentioned it to me?” 

My parents never mentioned it. My high school never mentioned it. My college never mentioned it. My professional development seminars never mentioned it. The books I read never mentioned it. 

Perhaps it was obvious to others that thinking is a skill, but it wasn’t obvious to me. I thought thinking was different from activities that were obviously skill-based like sports. It was obvious to me that athletes like Lebron James had to learn basketball skills—and practice them—in order to get better at basketball. But I’d always looked at intelligent people like Paul Graham and thought that they were born thinkers. It never occurred to me that they might have learned and practiced how to think. But when I heard thinking was a skill, I realized the people I admired acquired thinking skills in much the same way I’d seen athletes acquiring athletic skills. 

I felt like an idiot. For years I’d never made the connection between thinking and other skills. 

For the next few weeks, I began thinking this through. If thinking is a skill, I thought, then it must be analogous to other skills. Skills in general have these features:

• You can acquire skills and get better at them over time.

• You can be better or worse at skills.

• You can find better and worse methods for executing a skill.

• You can practice skills to get better.

So if thinking is a skill, then the following must be true: 

• You can acquire thinking skills and get better at thinking over time.

• You can be better or worse at thinking.

• You can find better and worse methods for thinking.

• You can practice thinking to get better.

To understand these points, let’s start by defining what we mean by ‘thinking.’ 

What Is Thinking?

People use the word ‘thinking’ to describe activities like calculating, remembering, planning, imagining, and deciding. Among these activities, I’m only interested in the ones that aim at achieving an accurate result. Not all types of thinking aim at accuracy. Imagining or fantasizing counts as thinking, but these activities don’t necessarily aim at representing the way the world actually is. I’m not interested in these types of thinking, but only the ones that aim at accuracy.

The goal of thinking in this sense is to come to know or understand how the world really is. When you’re doing a task like calculating numbers, deciding on a diet to lower your cholesterol, or picking a stock, you are looking to get accurate results. For example, in elementary school, all of us learned a method for adding numbers. In order to add numbers like 18 and 18, you learned to add up numbers in the 1s column and carry any extra digits to the next column like this:    

By contrast with this method, if you were just to guess the sum, then you would be inconsistent or inaccurate in your results. 

Likewise, suppose your friend recommends that you buy a stock because he notices a long waitlist for the company’s products to arrive and he thinks that the stock price will soar. You buy a few shares based on his recommendation. Later the stock price plummets because the company doesn’t have the funds to run its production line overseas. If you use shallow thinking like this to make investment decisions, then your investment results are going to be inconsistent. 

These examples illustrate the type of thinking that I’m talking about here: it’s thinking that aims at achieving an accurate result. Now that we are clear on what thinking is, let’s look at skill.

What Is Skill?

Skills are abilities. In particular, a skill is an acquired ability to do something. There are two types of abilities: abilities we are born with and abilities we acquire. Skills are abilities of this second sort. For example, you are born with the ability to see, but you acquire the skill to read; you are born with the ability to hear, but you acquire the skill to understand a language; you are born with the ability to taste, but you acquire the skill to be a cook or food critic.

If you look at LeBron James, he certainly has exceptional natural abilities like height, ability to jump, and hand-eye coordination, but he won’t be an exceptional basketball player if he doesn't acquire and master basketball skills like shooting, passing, and defense.

Similarly, if you look at Paul Graham, he certainly has exceptional natural cognitive abilities, but he won’t be an exceptional thinker if he doesn’t acquire and master thinking skills like understanding arguments. 

In both cases, exceptional performers aren’t born that way; rather, they’ve become exceptional by practicing the right methods over and over. 

How do you acquire a skill? 

• First, you find a teacher–a book or person–somebody who knows how to do the thing you want to learn. The teacher gives you the method for acquiring the skill you want. 

• Second, you imitate the method the teacher shows you, and then you practice over and over until you become proficient in the skill. 

Here’s an example. Warren Buffett attributes his success to finding the right teacher and imitating his methods. When Buffett went to Columbia Business School, he discovered that Benjamin Graham was teaching value investing. Buffett quickly took notice and started studying Graham’s methods. 

Over time, Buffett would meet with Graham for investing advice, read his acclaimed book, The Intelligent Investor, imitate Graham’s methods, and practice them over and over. That’s how Buffett acquired the skill of investing.

Why Is It Important To Work on Thinking Skills? 

There are degrees of mastering a skill. Those degrees correspond to better and worse ways of executing the skill. You can be a decent chef or master chef who runs a world-class restaurant; you can be a decent investor or be a professional investor who handles billions of dollars; you can be a recreational basketball player or a professional basketball player who plays at the highest level. 

When it comes to outcomes, consistency is the mark of mastery. A novice can get a good outcome once by dumb luck, but can’t replicate the result over the long term. For example, a novice can get lucky and cook a delicious meal once by luck, but it is the mark of a master chef to make an excellent meal most of the time. A novice can get lucky and shoot the basketball great once, but it takes mastery to shoot the basketball great most of the time. A novice can get lucky and pick the right stock to bet on once, but it takes mastery to pick the right stock most of the time. 

When it comes to thinking, consistently getting accurate results is important. For example, you can take a guess and find a flaw in someone’s argument. But if you understand the form of the argument and understand the common errors in reasoning, you are bound to consistently arrive at accurate results in your thinking.

I’ve described some of the things that thinking has in common with other skills. Let me highlight a difference: thinking is more general than other skills; it applies to more things.

Different skills have different ranges of application. Some skills are domain-specific; others are general in scope. A soccer goalie has some domain-specific skills to stop the other team from scoring, but running fast is a more general skill that can apply in many sports. For example, a fast runner is also valuable in track, football, and basketball.  

Writing is even more general than running. Writing applies much more than domain-specific skills like brainstorming ideas, solving sudoku puzzles, or coding in C++. 

Thinking is even more general than writing. Thinking is a meta-skill.

You can apply thinking to many more things than even writing: understanding an argument, looking for scientific truth, communicating an idea, solving a problem, and coming up with creative ideas. 

Not All Thinking Is Created Equal

If the objective of thinking is accuracy and consistency, then there are better and worse methods for thinking. Let’s look at some examples that show how some methods for thinking can be better or worse:

Calculating numbers

Better Method: You can calculate 2+2+2 by adding each number one by one, or multiplying 2 by 3, or using a calculator. These methods will bring you correct results consistently. 

Worse Method: You can guess at an answer. Guessing will bring you inconsistent results. Sometimes your guess will be accurate and sometimes your guess will be inaccurate. In fact, most of the time your guess will be inaccurate. 

Baking Cake

Better Method: You can bake a cake by emulating a time-tested method. This method will bring you consistent results. 

Worse Method: You can bake based on your hunch without prior knowledge about baking principles like temperature, texture, and time. This method will bring you inconsistent results: the taste, shape, and texture of the cake will be different every time you bake. Sometimes your hunch will make a delicious cake, but most of the time you will find burnt, dry, and disgusting cake.

Picking Stocks

Better Method: You can pick stocks by looking at the company’s financials, forecasting future demand, and reviewing past trends. This method will bring you consistent results.  

Worse Method: You can look at tarot cards to decide what stock to pick. This method will bring you gains and losses inconsistently. Sometimes you will just happen to pick the right stock, but most of the time you will have similar results by throwing a dart at some stock tickers and picking one.

The method you use to calculate numbers, bake cakes, and pick stocks can yield results that are consistent or inconsistent. The same is true for thinking methods. 

Evaluating a claim

There are better and worse methods for thinking, just as there are better and worse methods for doing other things. 

When you’re evaluating claims, for instance, you can use your intuition to determine whether or not a claim is true. Intuition initially seems right to us, but it is vulnerable to cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are judgment shortcuts that help us make quick decisions. Often cognitive biases lead us to inconsistent and inaccurate results. Using your intuition to evaluate claims makes you vulnerable to accepting false claims.

By contrast, you can evaluate a claim by evaluating the reasons to believe that it’s true. Those reasons might come from ordinary people, or they might come from experts. 

An expert could be a good starting point to understand the reasons that support a claim, but thinking skills go further than consulting expert opinion. You need to understand how to evaluate the expert’s opinion. You need to acquire thinking skills that enable you to evaluate a claim from an expert or novice. 

Those skills include understanding what an argument is, knowing about cognitive biases, knowing about logical fallacies, knowing how and when to use experts, and understanding the need for withholding judgment to improve your decision-making. These methods will bring you consistent results.

Developing Thinking Skills

When it comes to the development of critical thinking skills, it’s not “anything goes”; there’s a method to doing it in a better way. The people who acquire critical thinking abilities and practice them get better results: they are consistently more accurate than people who don’t. Thinking skills help you improve your critical thinking process by coming up with better possible solutions, improving your creative thinking, evaluating and synthesizing different points of view, and optimizing your problem-solving skills.

Some of those methods to improve your cognitive skills are logic, mathematics, probability, and the rules for using language—natural or artificial.

On the journey to develop strong critical thinking skills, you need to know and understand what’s true. They don’t teach these skills in high school. Many times they don’t teach them in college either. This is a shortcoming of higher education which I discuss here. Instead, adult learners have to pick up these skills on their own and practice applying them on their own in everyday life. That’s actually why I started Think, But How?—I wanted to provide adult learners with resources to improve their thought process and become strong critical thinkers. 

One way to achieve this is by embarking on the wisdom seeker journey. I write about my quest to see the world for what it is rather than what I want it to be. I hope by reading, learning, and imitating these methods you can optimize your own thinking skills.

Did you ever have a conversation with your parents like this:

Parent: “It’s time to go to bed.”
Child: “Why?”
Parent: “Because this is your bedtime.”

At the time, you might have felt unsatisfied with their response, but you didn’t know how to argue against them. Knowledge is power, and in this case you were powerless to resist your parents because you didn’t know about logical fallacies—errors in reasoning such as straw man, ad hominem, and appeal to popularity. 

Here’s another example to illustrate the same kind of fallacy:

Circle: “Skydiving is dangerous.”
Me: “Why?”
Circle: “Because it’s unsafe.”

The fallacy Circle commits (the same one committed by the parent in the earlier example) is called circular reasoning or begging the question. Circular reasoning happens when the arguer assumes that the conclusion is true rather than proving that it’s true. To better understand what this means, let’s first go over what an argument is. 

An argument is a series of statements that try to prove a point. The statement that the arguer tries to prove is called the conclusion. The statements that try to prove the conclusion are called premises. 

In order to prove a conclusion, the premises can’t include the conclusion itself. That would be like trying to prove that what The New York Times says is true by quoting the Times itself. My friend Circle can’t prove that skydiving is dangerous simply by saying it’s dangerous. In other words, he can’t prove it’s dangerous by saying, “Skydiving is dangerous because it’s dangerous.” You can’t prove something true simply by saying it or repeating it. 

Rather, to prove something true, you need to bring forward reasons that are independent of the conclusion—reasons that don’t already assume or presuppose that your conclusion is true. For example, to prove that skydiving is dangerous, Circle would need to cite some data about, say, how frequently people get injured or die while skydiving.

When you present an argument you’re supposed to be giving reasons to think that the conclusion is true. But when someone commits the fallacy of circular reasoning, they’re failing to provide any reasons to think the conclusion is true. Here’s another example that illustrates this point:

God exists.
Therefore, God exists.

You can see in this example that there is no reason to believe the conclusion of the argument. Instead, the arguer has simply restated the conclusion--they’re presupposing that their conclusion is true. More precisely, they’re using their conclusion as a premise or presupposition. That’s a way of defining circular reasoning: Circular reasoning occurs when someone uses their conclusion as one of their premises. 

Typically circular reasoning isn’t as obvious as this example. Usually, when people commit the fallacy they don’t restate the conclusion verbatim; they instead change the way it’s worded. 

Think again about my conversation with Circle. Here’s Circle’s so-called argument:

Premise: Skydiving is unsafe. 
Conclusion: Skydiving is dangerous.

Circle says skydiving is unsafe because it’s dangerous. The word ‘unsafe’ is different from the word ‘dangerous.’ The problem is, even though ‘unsafe’ and ‘dangerous’ are different words, they still mean the same thing. In reality, then, Circle is saying that skydiving is dangerous because it’s dangerous; he’s just using a different word for ‘dangerous.’ 

Changing the word creates the illusion that Circle is presenting real reasons to believe his conclusion that skydiving is dangerous, but in fact, he’s just restating the conclusion. 

Here’s another example of this:

The word of God is true.
Therefore, the Bible is true.

Once again, the arguer isn’t providing any reasons to think the conclusion is true, but is simply replacing one expression for another: ‘word of God’ for ‘Bible.’

Here are a few more examples of circular reasoning:

Example #1

“The death penalty is justified because the government has good reason to put someone to death for serious offenses.”

Explanation: In this case, the arguer isn’t providing any reasons that prove the death penalty is justified. They are just restating their conclusion using different words. They’re using ‘has good reason to’ in place of ‘justified.’ The arguer doesn’t give any reasons to think that the conclusion is true. 

Example #2

“The death penalty is never justified because taking a human life is always wrong.” 

Explanation: In this case, the arguer isn’t providing any reasons that prove the death penalty is never justified. The arguer is just substituting ‘always wrong’ for ‘is never justified.’ The arguer doesn’t give any reasons to think that the conclusion is true, but is simply restating the conclusion using different words.  

Example #3

“Smoking is bad because it has a negative impact on your health.”

Explanation: In this case, the arguer isn’t providing any reasons that prove that smoking is bad. The arguer is just replacing ‘bad’ with ‘negative impact.’ The arguer doesn’t give any reasons to think that the conclusion is true, but is simply restating the conclusion using different words. 

Let’s go back to the parent example:

Parent: “It’s time to go to bed.”
Child: “Why?”
Parent: “Because this is your bedtime.”

Explanation: The parent is saying, “It’s time to go to bed because it’s time to go to bed.” There is no reason provided to support the conclusion. They’re just restating the conclusion using different words. 

Here’s another example of a parent using circular reasoning:

Parent: “Brushing your teeth is healthy.” 
Child: “Why?” 
Parent: “Because it's good for your teeth.”

Explanation: The above is an example of how some parents explain to their kids why they should brush their teeth. In this example, ‘healthy’ and ‘good’ mean the same thing. The parent is not giving any reasons to believe that brushing your teeth is healthy for your teeth. They’re just restating the conclusion using different words.

How to Disarm Circular Reasoning

All fallacies are errors in reasoning. Circular reasoning in particular happens when the person making the argument assumes their conclusion is true instead of proving it’s true. It’s like a prosecutor making a case by saying, “Mr. Smith committed this felony because he did it.” The prosecutor isn’t giving any reasons to support his conclusion.  

There are two steps for disarming circular reasoning: 

1. Get clear on the terms.

2. Point out that the arguer is simply restating their conclusion, and not providing any reasons to accept it.

Suppose I commit a circular reasoning fallacy: “Circular reasoning is bad,” I say, “because it’s stupid.”

First, ask me to clarify my terms. For example, you can say, “What do you mean by ‘bad’ and ‘stupid’?” Asking for clarification will give you more clarity on what I am trying to say.

Second, you can point out that I’m just restating my conclusion. For example, you could say, “It sounds like ‘bad’ and ‘stupid’ mean exactly the same thing here. In that case, you are not giving me any reasons to believe your conclusion. You’re just restating your conclusion by using different words.”

Circular reasoning is a common fallacy because people simply want you to believe their conclusion without giving any support. The two-step process helps you ask for support for the conclusion, and it also helps you identify and avoid the fallacy.

The Wisdom Seeker’s Approach to Circular Reasoning

A wisdom seeker is committed to knowing and understanding what’s true. A wisdom seeker is committed to developing critical thinking skills and learning about different types of arguments. They’re committed to pointing out formal fallacies and informal fallacies when people commit them, and they’re committed to recognizing circular reasoning in other people’s arguments and in their own. 

Here’s the definition of an argument: 

An argument is a series of statements that try to prove a point. The statement that the arguer tries to prove is called the conclusion. It’s the main point the arguer is trying to prove. The statements that try to prove the conclusion are called premises.

Just like every molecule is made of atoms, every argument is made of statements. Statements are things that are either true or false. Here are some examples of statements: “The house is red,” “James is tall, and Adam is fast,” “Either you can go straight, or you can make a right,” “If you are tired, then you will make mistakes,” “Shawn can win the race only if he enters it.” 

In conversation, we request an argument when we ask someone to state their reasons for believing a claim. A typical request for an argument would look like this: 

Rick: “I believe that Ben is an American.” 

Sally: “Why do you believe that Ben is an American?”

Rick: “Because Ben was born in New York, and all New Yorkers are American.” 

Rick is stating something that he believes, and Sally is asking Rick to state his reasons for believing it. When Rick states those reasons, he is supplying premises that support the conclusion--his claim that Ben is an American. 

Here’s another example of an argument that might appear in ordinary conversation:

Michael: “The dinosaurs existed.” 

Jane: “What are your reasons for believing that the dinosaurs existed?” 

Michael: “Scientists have identified remains from dinosaurs.”

To respond to Jane’s request for a reason, Michael states reasons that support his conclusion. 

Argument Format and Examples:

When an argument occurs in conversation, it’s often stated in a way that’s unclear. This makes it hard to evaluate. Because of that it’s helpful to put arguments into a standard format that makes it clear which statements are premises, and which statement is the conclusion. 

Here’s what the standard format looks like:

To put an argument in standard format, first identify which statement is the conclusion and which statements are premises that are supposed to support the conclusion. Place the premises on separate lines and the conclusion on the last line. 

There are certain expressions in English that often (but not always) mark a conclusion. Common conclusion indicators include, “Therefore,” “Hence,” “Thus,” “So,” “As a result,” “Consequently,” “Ergo,” “It must be the case that,” and “It follows that.” 

Let’s take a look at some examples:

Example 1:

Rick’s argument can be formatted as follows:

Premise 1: All New Yorkers are American.

Premise 2: Ben is a New Yorker.

Conclusion: Therefore, Ben is an American.

Example 2:

Michael’s argument can be formatted as follows:

Premise 1: If scientists identified dinosaur remains, then dinosaurs existed.

Premise 2: Scientists identified dinosaur remains.

Conclusion: Therefore, dinosaurs existed. 

Example 3:

Premise 1: All humans are mortal.

Premise 2: Sam is a human.

Conclusion: Therefore, Sam is mortal.

Example 4: 

Premise 1: If it rained, then my yard is wet.

Premise 2: It rained.

Conclusion: Therefore, my yard is wet.

Example 5:

Premise: If it rains, then my yard is wet.

Conclusion: Therefore, if my yard isn’t wet, then it didn’t rain.

Understanding Arguments Leads to Evaluating Arguments

The ability to recognize arguments in everyday life is one of the first steps in developing critical thinking skills. Over time, you’ll be able to pinpoint the conclusion and premises of an argument with ease. Knowing how to do that is a crucial step in evaluating arguments and in developing argumentation skills. It also helps you understand and appreciate other points of view on a given subject matter. 

In later posts, I’ll talk more about types of arguments (valid, inductive, and fallacious) and how to evaluate them. Logicians have a catalog of standard argument forms. For example, the following form is called a categorical syllogism:

All As are B

X is A

Therefore, X is B

Likewise, the following form is called a conditional or hypothetical syllogism:

If P, then Q

If Q, then R

Therefore, if P, then R

These are examples of valid forms; that is, if you plug in values for the variables in these forms and the resulting premises are true, then the conclusion is guaranteed to be true. But there are also standard forms for inductive reasoning. Inductive forms are forms that have this attribute: if the premises are true, then conclusion isn’t guaranteed to be true, but it’s probably true. Here’s an example of an inductive form called an inductive generalization:

All As observed so far are B

Therefore, All As are B

Learning these forms is another important step in developing your critical thinking skills. Once you master them, you’ll be able to evaluate even complex arguments since those arguments are built up by putting together many simpler ones.

Suppose your plane crashed in the middle of nowhere with you and a dozen other survivors. You have three options:

1. Everyone leaves the crash site to look for food and help.

2. Half of the group leaves the crash site to look for food and help, while the other half stays put.

3. Everyone stays at the crash site.

What would you do? 

This question was posed to me in a seminar. I felt certain that everyone should go look for food and help. I made my case to our group, and they ended up siding with me. But I was wrong, and so were they. 

There was an expert in the room: a former US Air Force pilot. He explained that staying close to the plane was by far the best option for survival. His reasoning was that the search crew would have some idea of the plane’s last location by tracking the black box and smoke from the wreckage.

I had felt certain about my solution to this problem, but feeling certain doesn’t guarantee that your assessment is accurate. We humans have inherited many dispositions from our evolutionary past. Those dispositions include cognitive biases, and those biases can make us feel certain even when we’re wrong. In addition, they can trigger errors in reasoning—fallacies. 

The difference between cognitive biases and fallacies is this: cognitive biases are tendencies to act, whereas fallacies are actual actions. By analogy, craving sugar is a tendency to act, whereas eating too much ice cream is an actual action. 

Before going into this, let’s first understand what cognitive biases and fallacies are. 

Cognitive biases are mental shortcuts (called heuristics) that fill in gaps in our information and help us act decisively despite those gaps. 

The concept of cognitive bias was first introduced by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. They distinguished two cognitive mechanisms for decision-making: fast thinking, which uses mental shortcuts, and slow thinking, which uses reasoning. Cognitive biases are examples of fast thinking. 

Cognitive biases evolved as a way of saving time and energy while at the same time promoting survival. The human brain is limited in its capacity to process information. We make so many decisions during the day that it would be taxing on our brains to make every decision in a slow, thoughtful manner. Moreover, in the environment in which our prehistoric ancestors lived, making every decision in a slow, thoughtful manner could be deadly! 

Cognitive biases evolved as a way of speeding up information processing, and gave our ancestors the ability to act decisively in life and death situations. For most of us today, quick life-and-death decisions are rare, yet we retain these biases as part of our evolutionary inheritance. 

Here are some of the cognitive biases we all have:

Confirmation bias: A tendency to filter information in a way that confirms what you already think. For example, you seek information that validates your current liberal point of view by watching CNN, CNBC, and reading the New York Times, and you discount news from sources like Fox and the Wall Street Journal. Confirmation bias is often what drives people to accept even the most absurd conspiracy theories: they only examine information that confirms the theory, not any information that disconfirms it. 

Optimism bias: A tendency to be over-optimistic, and to underestimate the probability of undesirable outcomes. For example, instead of seeing the world for what it is, you overestimate your chances of succeeding at something. Overconfidence in positive outcomes is often the result of optimism bias.

Self-serving bias: A tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. For example, many employees take credit for their wins but ignore their mistakes.

Availability bias (also called availability heuristic): A tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events based on recent and emotional memories. For example, you make a decision based on something that recently happened to you and avoid looking at the big picture. 

Anchoring bias: A tendency to rely too much on one trait or piece of information. For example, you rely too heavily on a first impression and devalue subsequent information. Anchoring bias is often what drives people to hold onto misconceptions even after they’ve seen disconfirming evidence.

Attribution bias: A tendency to accept praise for good outcomes but not blame for bad outcomes when I’m evaluating my own performance but not when I’m evaluating other people’s performance. For example, suppose I make a decision that has a good outcome. I’ll accept credit for the good outcome, and say it’s because I’m a genius, but I’ll try to avoid blame for the bad outcome; I’ll instead try to blame it on external circumstances. Things are different if I’m evaluating someone else’s performance. In that case, I’m more willing to assign blame to the person, and I’m also more willing to attribute that person’s successes to external factors.

Here are the names of some other common cognitive biases: Observer bias, The halo effect bias, Ingroup bias, ​​Implicit bias, Bandwagon effect, The Dunning-Kruger Effect, and Hindsight bias.

Now that we understand what cognitive biases are, let’s look at fallacies.

A fallacy is an error in reasoning.

Reasoning, or argumentation, is the process of supporting a statement by appeal to other statements. The statement you’re trying to support is called the conclusion, and the statements that are supposed to support it are called premises. 

Reasoning can be correct or incorrect in just the way that mathematical calculation can. When reasoning is performed incorrectly, we say that it commits a fallacy.

The telltale sign of a fallacy is this: even if your premises are true, they still tell you nothing about whether or not your conclusion is true. Let’s look at an example. Here are two arguments: 

Fallacious Argument A:

If it’s 2021, then it’s the 21st Century Premise (true statement)

It’s the 21st Century Premise (true statement)

Therefore, it’s 2021 Conclusion (true statement)

Fallacious Argument B:

If it’s 2016, then it’s the 21st Century Premise (true statement)

It’s the 21st Century Premise (true statement)

Therefore, it’s 2016 Conclusion (false statement)

Argument A and Argument B have the same form. We can represent that form as follows:

Affirming the Consequent (Fallacy)

If P, then Q

Q

Therefore, P

Here ‘P’ and ‘Q’ are variables. In Argument A, the variable P has the value ‘it’s 2021’ and the variable Q has the value ‘it’s the 21st Century’. In Argument B, the variable P has the value ‘it’s 2016’ and the variable Q has the value ‘it’s the 21st Century’. 

When we plug in these values for the variables, we end up with true premises in both of the arguments: it’s true that if it’s 2021, then it’s the 21st century; it’s true that if it’s 2016, then it’s the 21st century, and it’s true that it’s the 21st century. 

Both arguments, then, have true premises. If we reason correctly from true premises, then we should arrive at a true conclusion every time. But notice what happens when we reason by affirming the consequent: sometimes true premises yield a true conclusion, and sometimes they don’t. This shows us that reasoning in this way is unreliable. Even if you have true premises, those premises still tell you nothing about whether or not the conclusion is true. 

That’s why we call this form of reasoning a fallacy. It’s an example of incorrect reasoning: even if the premises are true, they still don’t give you any reason to accept the conclusion.

Here are some common fallacies: 

Appeal to Authority Fallacy: Appeals to authority look to support a claim by appeal to the person who’s making the claim. If I say that there is an afterlife because Descartes believes in it, this is an example of committing an appeal to authority fallacy. A claim’s truth or falsity doesn’t depend on who’s making it, but my appeal to Descartes makes it out as if it does--as if it must be true just because Descartes accepts it.

Ad Hominem Fallacy (also known as a personal attack): Ad hominem arguments look to falsify an opponent’s claim by attacking the arguer. An example is the following argument: “It’s false that 2 + 2 = 4 because you are stupid.” A claim’s truth or falsity doesn’t depend on who’s making it. 

Hasty Generalization Fallacy: A generalization is stronger or weaker depending on the size of the initial sample. Hasty generalizations are weak generalizations. A generalization is hasty when we endorse a general claim without having observed a sample large enough to be confident that the claim is true. For example, “All the parrots I’ve ever seen are yellow, so all parrots must be yellow.” 

Straw Man Fallacy: The straw man is a logical fallacy that replaces something (a person, a viewpoint, an argument) with a distorted version that blows the opponent’s position out of proportion to make it easier to attack.

Here’s an example of straw man fallacy: 

Wife: “I’d rather go to a beach than a city.” 

Husband: “Why do you hate cities?” 

The wife never said that she hates cities. The husband misrepresents what she says to make her preferences seem more extreme than they are. 

Here are the names of some other common fallacies: Sunk cost fallacy, Gambler’s fallacy, Slippery slope fallacy, and Begging the question (circular reasoning).

How Cognitive Biases Can Trigger Fallacies

The difference between a cognitive bias and a fallacy is the difference between a tendency and an action. Tendencies to act are different from actions themselves. For example, we all have a craving to eat sugar and fat, but that’s different from actually eating sugar and fat. 

Similarly, cognitive biases are tendencies to make judgments based on inadequate or irrelevant evidence. We commit fallacies when we actually act on those tendencies. 

Cognitive biases can tempt you to commit fallacies. For example, humans have the tendency to want to belong in a group. If you are born in Alabama, then you are surrounded by Christians, and you will have the tendency to conform to your social surroundings by believing what Christians believe. If you are born in Kabul, then you are surrounded by Muslims, and you will have the tendency to conform to your social surroundings by believing what Muslims believe. 

The tendency to conform to social norms can lead people to commit an Appeal to popularity fallacy. Appeal to popularity happens when someone makes a claim based on popular opinion or a common belief among a specific group of people. Suppose, for instance, that I say, “There is an afterlife because most Christians around me believe in it.” This is an appeal to popularity fallacy because I believe something to be true because it is a popular opinion not because there is a reason to believe it.

Managing biases and fallacies: the good news and the bad 

The bad news about cognitive biases: You can’t get rid of them. I explain why here.

The good news about cognitive biases: You can learn to manage them. I describe how here.

The bad news about fallacies: Fallacious arguments can be persuasive and can fool you. Politicians and marketers use fallacious arguments to get us to do certain things. 

The good news about fallacies: You can learn about fallacies, spot them in other people’s reasoning, and take steps to avoid them yourself. 

How Wisdom Seekers Approach Cognitive Biases and Fallacies

Wisdom seekers are committed to developing critical thinking skills–including understanding cognitive biases and fallacies. Wisdom seekers understand that they can’t change the cognitive biases they have, but they can change whether they act on them. They know that acting on them can lead to false judgments. Instead, they default to withholding judgment until they have adequate evidence to accept or reject something.

Let’s pretend that you are new to Gmail. As a new user, you find yourself complaining about the five-second delay in sending email messages and you call it a bug–a flaw in the software. However, after using Gmail for a few days, you realize that you used the recall email feature several times a month. After using the recall feature, you think to yourself, “Wow! I love Gmail’s feature that allows me to recall my email!”

The Google engineers had an objective in mind: they wanted users to have the ability to recall incomplete and embarrassing emails, and they intentionally designed the app to have that feature.

The Gmail five-second delay might look like a design flaw, but it is a design feature.

Something analogous is true of cognitive biases. 

Cognitive biases are judgment shortcuts that predispose us to belong to a group and to act decisively when we have gaps in our information. People think that they’re design flaws in human thought—and with good reason: cognitive biases can damage us and the people around us. They can lead to poor decisions like judging someone based on their religion, school, or background. But, in fact, cognitive biases aren’t design flaws but instead design features of human thought. 

Think back to our Gmail example. We can easily get fooled into thinking that Gmail’s five-second delay is a design flaw, but in reality, it is a design feature to give us time to recall an email. We can easily think that cognitive biases are design flaws, but in reality, nature designed these features to enhance our chances of survival and reproduction. 

To understand this idea, you need to understand how we evolved the cognitive biases we have.

The Evolution of Cognitive Biases

Imagine that nature is an engineer. For nature to make sure that each species thrives it has two objectives:   

1. Members of the species must survive;

2. Members of the species must reproduce. 

Because nature has these two objectives, natural selection equips organisms with adaptations that increase the likelihood of (1) and (2). Cognitive biases are among the adaptations that natural selection equipped humans with. 

The species that adapt to their environment get to survive and reproduce. For example, when an asteroid hit the earth about 65 million years ago and the conditions on the earth dramatically changed, about 50% of the animals, including dinosaurs, went extinct because those species could not adapt to the new environment. The species that adapted got to survive and reproduce. 

Cognitive biases are features that enhance humans’ ability to survive and reproduce. They can be understood in terms of two kinds of dispositions:

1. A disposition to live in groups;

2. A disposition to make snap judgments.

A disposition to live in groups is a feature designed by nature for us to stick together to survive and reproduce. This disposition is one of the reasons why people want to be part of racial, national, religious, sports, city, or hobby groups. A larger group gives us more eyes and ears to spot danger. Also, living in a larger group gives us more chances to find a mate since a larger group has a larger pool of mates. 

The disposition to make snap judgments, on the other hand, is a feature designed by nature for us to fill in the blanks when we lack information. This feature enabled humans to survive in hostile environments, so they could act decisively in life-and-death situations with very little information. For example, if you were living in the savannah and you met someone outside your tribe, then with very little information, you labeled them friend or foe. Your whole tribe’s survival depended on your decision to label the outsider correctly without adequate information. Humans that learned to make snap judgments based on facial features, clothing, or other superficial attributes had a better chance of surviving and reproducing.

Since these two dispositions allow humans to survive and reproduce, these are design features. They can nevertheless look like flaws because there are many situations in which they lead to errors in judgment. For example, imagine you’re interviewing an overweight guy who’s poorly dressed. You judge him to be lazy and incompetent based on his looks. It turns out that this man is like a younger Winston Churchill, and you miss out on a great hire. 

Managing Cognitive Biases

Many people go a long way to get rid of cognitive biases by reading books, going to seminars, or spending years in meditation. The reality is that we can never get rid of cognitive biases because they’re features that we have as a result of natural selection. 

So what do we do then? The best option for us is to accept these design features and learn to manage them. I wrote about 4 steps to manage cognitive biases here. I outline them briefly below.

Step 1: Look for snap judgment warning signs: 

• Do you feel very confident about a judgment you’ve just made? 

• Are you making any decisions because of your disposition to join a group? 

• Ask yourself your real reason for arriving at that judgment. 

Step 2: Evaluate your reasons for making the judgment: 

• If your reason for making the judgment is X, then ask yourself, “Is it possible for X to be true, and yet for my judgment to be false? Can I imagine any circumstances in which X is true and my judgment is false?” 

• If the answer is yes, then ask yourself a further question, “Is it likely for X to be true and the judgment false?” If the answer is no, then you need to withhold judgment till you get better evidence.

Step 3: Seek reasons that actually establish that your judgment is accurate or inaccurate: 

• In step 2, you are making sure your initial reasons actually support your judgment. 

• If you find that those reasons don’t support your judgment, then you need to collect more evidence to make an accurate decision. 

Step 4: Continue to withhold judgment until you get more evidence: 

• If the evidence that you have available is not sufficient to support the conclusion, default to withholding judgment. 

How Wisdom Seekers Approach Cognitive Biases

Wisdom seekers are committed to knowing and understanding what’s true. Wisdom seekers accept that they have cognitive biases, and since there is no way to eliminate them, wisdom seekers take steps to manage them instead. 

Suppose I ask you to multiply two large numbers–say 12,653 and 65,321. How would you get the correct answer? You’d probably use a calculator or the good old multiplication algorithm you learned as a kid. One thing is clear: if you don’t use the correct method, then you’re not guaranteed to get the correct answer. 

Suppose now that I ask you to defend some claim that you believe–that I ask you to give me reasons, in other words, to believe that the claim is true. What’s true in the multiplication case is also true here: if your reasoning doesn’t follow a correct method, then you’re not guaranteed to get a correct conclusion. 

Reasoning, or argumentation, is the process of supporting a statement by appeal to other statements. The statement you’re trying to support is called the conclusion, and the statements that are supposed to support it are called premises. Reasoning can be correct or incorrect in just the way that mathematical calculation can. When reasoning is performed incorrectly, we say that it commits a fallacy.

A fallacy is an error in reasoning. 

The telltale sign of a fallacy is this: even if your premises are true, they still tell you nothing about whether or not your conclusion is true. Let’s look at an example. Here are two arguments: 

Fallacious Argument A

(1) If it’s 2021, then it’s the 21st Century (Premise (true statement))

(2) It’s the 21st Century(Premise (true statement))

Therefore, it’s 2021(Conclusion (true statement))

Fallacious Argument B

(1) If it’s 2016, then it’s the 21st Century(Premise (true statement))

(2) It’s the 21st Century(Premise (true statement))

Therefore, it’s 2016(Conclusion (false statement))

Argument A and Argument B have the same form. We can represent that form as follows:

Affirming the Consequent (Fallacy)

If P, then Q

Q

Therefore, P

Here ‘P’ and ‘Q’ are variables. In Argument A, the variable P has the value ‘it’s 2021’ and the variable Q has the value ‘it’s the 21st Century’. In Argument B, the variable P has the value ‘it’s 2016’ and the variable Q has the value ‘it’s the 21st Century’. 

When we plug in these values for the variables, we end up with true premises in both of the arguments: it’s true that if it’s 2021, then it’s the 21st century; it’s true that if it’s 2016, then it’s the 21st century, and it’s true that it’s the 21st century. 

Both arguments, then, have true premises. If we reason correctly from true premises, then we should arrive at a true conclusion every time. By analogy, if we correctly execute a multiplication algorithm then we should arrive at the correct product every time. 

But notice what happens when we reason by affirming the consequent: sometimes true premises yield a true conclusion, and sometimes they don’t. This shows us that reasoning in this way is unreliable. Even if you have true premises, those premises still tell you nothing about whether or not the conclusion is true. 

That’s why we call this form of reasoning a fallacy. It’s an example of incorrect reasoning: even if the premises are true, they still don’t give you any reason to accept the conclusion.

You can contrast affirming the consequent with a correct form of reasoning called modus ponens. Here’s an example:

Valid Argument (Modus Ponens)

(1) If it’s 2021, then it’s the 21st Century (Premise)

(2) It’s 2021(Premise)

Therefore, it’s the 21st Century(Conclusion)

What makes this argument valid is that if its premises are true, then its conclusion is guaranteed to be true. What secures this guarantee is the argument’s form which we can represent as follows:

Modus Ponens (Valid)

If P, then Q(Premise)

P(Premise)

Therefore, Q(Conclusion)

If we fill in values for P and Q that make the premises of the argument true, then it is impossible for the conclusion to be false. That’s what makes an argument valid.

By contrast, we’ve seen that with a fallacy, even if the premises are true, it’s still possible for the conclusion to be false. That’s what makes fallacies unreliable forms of reasoning.

Here are some common fallacies: 

• Appeal to Authority Fallacy: Appeal to authority arguments look to support a claim by appeal to the person who’s making the claim. For example, if I say that there is an afterlife because Aristotle believes in it, this is a fallacy called the appeal to authority.

• Appeal to Popularity Fallacy: Appeal to popularity happens when someone makes a claim based on popular opinion or on a common belief among a specific group of people. For example, if I say that there is an afterlife because most people believe in it, this is a fallacy called the appeal to popularity. This is a fallacy because you believe something to be true since it is a popular opinion not because there is a reason to believe that. 

• Ad Hominem Fallacy (also known as a personal attack): Ad hominem means “to the person” in Latin. Ad hominem arguments look to falsify an opponent’s argument by attacking the arguer. For example, “Since Hitler is evil, everything he said is false.” A claim’s truth or falsity doesn’t depend on who’s making it. Hitler is a bad person, but that doesn’t mean that everything he says is false. (Conversely, just because people are good, that doesn’t mean everything they say is true. Even good people can be wrong.) Dismissing a claim simply because a bad person says it is an example of Ad hominem. 

• Hasty Generalization Fallacy: A generalization is stronger or weaker depending on the size of the initial sample. Hasty generalizations are weak generalizations. A generalization is hasty when we endorse a general claim without having observed a sample large enough to be confident that the claim is true. For example, if someone says, “All the parrots I’ve ever seen are yellow, so all parrots must be yellow,” then they are making a hasty generalization based on seeing a small sample.

• Straw Man Fallacy: The straw man is a logical fallacy that replaces something (a person, a viewpoint, an argument) with a distorted version that blows the opponent’s position out of proportion to make it easier to attack. For example, “Wife: “I’d rather go to a beach than New York City.” Husband: “Why do you hate New York City?” The wife never said that she hates New York City. The husband misrepresents what she says to make her preferences seem more extreme than they are. 

Here are the names of some other common fallacies: Post hoc ergo propter hoc, Red herring fallacy, Slippery slope fallacy, Begging the question (circular reasoning), Ad populum (Bandwagon fallacy), The correlation/causation fallacy, Tu quoque. 

Formal Fallacies Versus Informal Fallacies

Some people distinguish formal fallacies from informal ones. To understand the difference you first have to know that there are two kinds of arguments that actually support their conclusions: valid and inductive. In a valid argument, true premises guarantee a true conclusion. In an inductive argument, true premises don’t guarantee a true conclusion, but they give us good reason to think that the conclusion is true. Here are two examples to illustrate the difference:

Valid

All Athenian men are bald 

Socrates is an Athenian man

Therefore, Socrates is bald

Inductive

90% of Athenian men are bald 

Socrates is an Athenian man

Therefore, Socrates is (probably) bald

If the premises of the valid argument are true, then the conclusion is guaranteed to be true–it’s impossible for it to be false. On the other hand, if the premises of the inductive argument are true, the conclusion isn’t guaranteed to be true, but it’s probably true.

When people try to advance a valid argument but commit an error, we call it a formal fallacy. On the other hand, when people try to advance an inductive argument but commit an error, we call it an informal fallacy. That’s the difference between formal and informal fallacies.

Wisdom Seekers and Fallacies

Regardless of what kind of fallacies we’re talking about, wisdom seekers are committed to avoiding them. They’re committed to developing critical thinking skills–including the ability to identify and avoid errors in reasoning. They are careful to make sure their arguments are either valid or inductive, and if they don’t know how to argue for a particular claim, they’ll wait and give it more thought. Wisdom seekers will default to withholding judgment until they get better reasoning to accept or reject a claim.

People always said I was a calm guy. I never got angry or raised my voice. But it all changed when my daughter turned 3. 

Like many 3-year-olds, she was testing her limits. She would flat out ignore me when I told her to do something, or she would look me in the eye and start drawing on the furniture. I started getting angry at her. I’d shout at her, she’d cry, and I’d feel sick to the stomach. But I couldn’t stop myself. 

“I better look for anger management books,” I thought. 

Anger is an emotion, and emotions, in general, belong to a rapid response system that helps us respond to changes in our environment that could impact our survival or well-being. Anger, in particular, is a natural response to threats. It’s a rapid response that helps us defend ourselves from an attack. Emotions like anger evolved to enable us to survive. It’s natural for us to experience them, but they need to be managed correctly or else they can have a negative impact on us and the people around us.

What Cognitive Biases and Emotions Have in Common

Cognitive biases are similar to emotions. They belong to a rapid response system that helps us to fill in gaps in our information and act decisively despite those gaps. We all have them. We have evolved to have both anger and cognitive biases to survive and reproduce.

The concept of cognitive bias was first introduced by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman distinguishes two cognitive mechanisms for decision making: fast thinking, which uses mental shortcuts, and slow thinking, which uses reasoning. 

A brain has only a limited amount of processing power. To make the most of that processing power, natural selection favored mental shortcuts for information processing. For example, when I ask you what 2 + 2 equals, you can answer with minimal effort. You are using a mental shortcut: instead of adding (1 + 1) and (1 + 1), you are simply using your past experience with numbers to come to the shortcut answer of 4.

Cognitive psychologists estimate that we make around 80% of our decisions using these mental shortcuts. These shortcuts enable the brain to save energy, so we can focus on really important decisions.

The problem is that many people–myself included–make important decisions using these shortcuts. Even though I’d spend hours deciding where to take my wife for dinner, or reading dozens of reviews to buy a tech gadget, or debating which basketball player is the greatest of all time—I’d decide which politician to vote for in less than a minute. 

Because fast thinking is more prone to errors, we can make mistakes, those mistakes can hurt us and the people around us. Just as acting impulsively out of anger can be damaging, making judgments impulsively based on, say, a first impression or someone else’s gossip can be damaging as well. 

4 Steps to Managing Cognitive Biases

Psychologists have developed techniques for managing emotions. It’s possible to construct analogous techniques for managing cognitive biases. Here are steps to manage cognitive bias which are based on the anger management strategies outlined by the American Psychological Association:

Step 1: Look for fast-thinking warning signs: Do you feel very confident about a judgment you’ve just made? Relax and ask yourself your real reasons for making the judgment. What reasons have you considered to arrive at that judgment? If your goal is to know and understand what’s true, making a snap judgment is not going to help you achieve it. Snap judgments are, by definition, decisions made quickly on the basis of very little information. 

Suppose, for instance, that you are interviewing someone for a job. If you make your decision to hire or not within the first two minutes of meeting the candidate, then you’ve made a snap judgment based on a superficial trait like the way they dress, or speak, or look. Know that your first impression probably reflects a mental shortcut that is not going to help you make an accurate judgment. This will be harmful to the candidate, to you, and to your company. 

Step 2: Evaluate your reasons for making the judgment: If your reason for making the judgment is X, then ask yourself, “Is it possible for X to be true, and yet for my judgment to be false? Can I imagine any circumstances in which X is true and my judgment is false?” If the answer is yes, then ask yourself a further question, “Is it likely for X to be true and the judgment false?” If the answer is no, then you need to withhold judgment till you get better evidence.

For our interview example, ask yourself, “Why am I making this judgment about this candidate?” Is your hiring decision based on the candidate’s ability to get the job done, or is it based on some other factor such as their appearance?

Step 3: Seek reasons that actually establish that your judgment is accurate or inaccurate: In step 2, you are making sure your initial reasons actually support your judgment. If you find that those reasons don’t support your judgment, then you need to collect more evidence to make an accurate decision. This is an essential step for any worthwhile decision that has a long-term impact. 

Thinking back to the interview example: To collect more evidence to make your hiring decision, you need to ask the candidate a series of questions or ask them to complete a series of tests that will reveal whether they have the needed qualifications. You might need to schedule a second interview or get feedback about them from your co-workers to form a more complete picture of their performance. 

Step 4: Continue to withhold judgment until you get more evidence: A wisdom seeker’s goal is to know and understand what’s true. If the evidence that you have available is not sufficient to support the conclusion, default to withholding judgment. 

On this point, our interview example poses a challenge because you have to decide on a candidate. If you’re having trouble making a decision based on the information you’ve gotten so far, then maybe you have to schedule a second interview to get more. If you find that your interviews often leave you with inadequate evidence to make a decision, then you need to rethink your interview process. You need to re-engineer the process to secure better evidence in the future.

Withholding Judgment: The Wisdom Seeker Default

This technique is an important tool for wisdom seekers to make accurate decisions and to minimize cognitive biases. Understanding that our cognitive biases interfere with our decision-making helps us to minimize their effects. Withholding judgment as a default helps us avoid fast thinking and make more accurate decisions.

He looked straight at me. I made sure my backpack was secure. The train was slowing down. He looked at me again. I secured my passport. He took one step towards me. I stood up, ready for anything. He took two more steps. My hands shook. I braced myself: “This is it,” I thought, “he’s gonna rob me and slit my throat.” I could see the newspaper headline: “Young American slashed to death on a train.”

He was an arm’s length away. The train came to a stop. He lunged forward, right past me through the door and into the arms of a tiny, gray-haired woman: “Maman!” he exclaimed.

I watched them exchange hugs and kisses. I felt like an idiot as she ran her fingers across his balding head with affection. The train doors closed and sent me on my way. 

I’m relieved I didn’t die that day, but I’m embarrassed by my snap judgment: I completely misjudged this guy. I realized that I had watched too many movies with villains that looked like him. I’d stereotyped him. 

Stereotyping happens when we make a judgment about someone based on a preconceived notion of the kind of person they are. In other words, we see some traits the person has, and automatically categorize them as someone of a certain kind. We then use our preconceived notions about that kind to make further judgments about the person. 

For example, I was stereotyping when I made a judgment about the train guy based on my preconception of a tattooed biker. I saw his traits (the sleeveless jean jacket, tattoos, and scar) and automatically categorized him as an outlaw. My personal beliefs and preconceived notions about outlaw bikers led me to further judgment that he meant to slit my throat.

Stereotyping is a very common type of cognitive bias. 

The concept of cognitive bias was first introduced by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman distinguishes two cognitive mechanisms for decision making: fast thinking, which uses mental shortcuts, and slow thinking, which uses reasoning. Cognitive biases are examples of fast thinking. Think again about stereotyping: rather than investigating the train guy’s character, or withholding judgment about him, I made a snap judgment about him and his intentions based on how he looked. 

Kahneman explains, “As we navigate our lives, we normally allow ourselves to be guided by impressions and feelings, and the confidence we have in our intuitive beliefs and preferences is usually justified. But not always. We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.”

The train story provides an example of my own cognitive bias in action, and perhaps yours: if my description of the guy on the train triggered your suspicions that he was a villain, then you made a judgment based on a stereotype too. 

The Evolution of Cognitive Autopilot

Cognitive biases (synonyms include “cognitive illusions” or “cognitive distortions”) evolved as a way of saving time and energy while at the same time promoting survival. We make so many decisions during the day that it would be taxing on our brains to make every decision in a slow, thoughtful manner. Imagine brushing your teeth and thinking about every brushstroke, or thinking about applying soap to each part of your body while showering, or every bite at breakfast, or every word you type on your keyboard. You would be exhausted by 10 am. To avoid this kind of decision fatigue, we make most of our minute-to-minute decisions using cognitive shortcuts. 

You can think of cognitive biases as thinking on autopilot. Many aircraft have an autopilot system that enables the plane to operate without the pilot intervening. It’s designed to give pilots a break from making thousands of decisions over the span of the flight. That way they can save energy and be ready for really important decisions like when and where to land the plane.

Our brains evolved a similar division of labor. A brain has only a limited amount of processing power. To make the most of that processing power, natural selection favored mental shortcuts, known as heuristics, for information processing. For example, when I ask you what 2 + 2 equals, you can answer with minimal effort. You are using a mental shortcut: instead of adding (1 + 1) and (1 + 1), you are simply using your past experience with numbers to come to the shortcut answer of 4.   

Cognitive psychologists estimate that we make around 80% of our decisions using these energy-efficient shortcuts; in other words, we make them on autopilot. 

How Thinking on Autopilot Hurts People

When we think on autopilot, we use the pre-programmed cognitive biases in our brain. We make decisions, in other words, based on a prejudgment or prejudice. Let me give you examples:

Imagine you are working for a New York company, and you’re interviewing an overweight guy who’s poorly dressed. You judge him to be lazy and incompetent based on his looks. It turns out that this man is like a younger Winston Churchill, and you miss out on a great hire.

Imagine you are interviewing a handsome guy that is well dressed to manage your family money, and you judge him to be hard-working and competent by his looks. It turns out that this man is a younger Charles Ponzi, and you end up hiring a con man.

When we form these misconceptions, the effects are often harmful. Our first impression of a person has nothing to do with their ability to do a certain job or ability. In my anecdote with the train, I completely misjudged the guy.

3 Ways to Manage the Cognitive Autopilot

As we discussed earlier, we can’t eliminate thinking on autopilot. It’s part of our evolutionary inheritance. However, there are 3 things that we can do to minimize the harmful effects of thinking on autopilot. 

1. Accept that we can’t eliminate thinking on autopilot.

2. Know the limitations of thinking on autopilot.

3. Manage the tendency of thinking on autopilot by withholding. 

#1: Accept that we can’t eliminate thinking on autopilot: Cognitive biases are part of our evolutionary inheritance. We’re hardwired with tendencies to make snap judgments. We can’t change those tendencies; we can only learn to manage them. 

#2: Know the limitations of thinking on autopilot: Every good pilot knows the limits of the autopilot. Pilots know that autopilot is a necessary evil for efficiency. They rely on autopilot once they have taken off, but they use their own experience and knowledge for important tasks like landing or handling emergencies. 

The same goes for our automatic thinking: every good thinker knows the limits of automatic thinking. Good thinkers know that automatic thinking is a necessary evil for efficiency, but that they can’t rely on automatic thinking for important decisions. Thinking on autopilot can work well for inconsequential decisions like where to eat dinner, but isn’t good for important decisions like which politician to vote for. 

#3: Manage the tendency to think on autopilot by withholding judgment: The most important thing a pilot can do in emergencies is to take over from the autopilot and decide on the situation at hand and act accordingly. The same goes for managing our automatic thinking: when we have an important decision to make, we need to stop thinking on autopilot. The next step is to use evidence to make important decisions. If the evidence is not sufficient to act or decide, then the best course of action is to withhold judgment.  

When you withhold judgment, you neither accept nor reject a claim. For example, when interviewing someone to hire, many people jump to a conclusion to hire or not in the first second of meeting the person. When you want to decide on an important decision like whom to work with, your best option is to withhold judgment until you are given enough evidence to make an informed decision about accepting or rejecting a claim.

Wisdom Seeker Approach to Automatic Thinking

We can’t change the cognitive biases we have, but we can change whether we act on them. Wisdom seekers are committed to knowing and understanding what’s true, so they’re going to reject many of the decisions we make on autopilot. They understand that cognitive biases lead to false judgments. Instead, they default to withholding judgment until they have adequate evidence to accept or reject something.

Humans need sugar to live, so evolution gave us the craving for it. Sugar was relatively scarce in the environment in which humans evolved, so our metabolism adapted to convert excess calories from sugar quickly and efficiently into fat. 

Fast forward 100,000 years: sugar is now abundant in our environment. But human metabolism hasn’t changed. It still quickly and efficiently converts sugar into fat. Since sugar is now abundant, people have gotten fatter and unhealthier. 

Something analogous is true of human thought.

Humans need to survive and reproduce, so evolution gave us the desire for group membership. 100,000 years ago, we had many reasons to join a group: protecting ourselves from predators and competing tribes, finding food and other resources, finding potential mates, and so on. So our brains evolved tendencies to think, feel, and act in ways that enabled us to live successfully in groups. Those tendencies include filling in the blanks with guesses, making snap judgments, stereotyping people on character traits, seeking approval from our tribe, searching to support our existing beliefs, and wanting to be right. 

Just like sugar cravings, we have these cognitive cravings because at one time they enabled members of our species to survive and successfully reproduce. 

Fast forward 100,000 years: Our environment is safe, we have laws, we are protected from predators and other people, we have abundant information at our fingertips, and we have access to abundant food and potential mates. But human cognition hasn’t changed. We still have the same cognitive cravings. 

There’s a more familiar term for these cognitive cravings. In psychology, they’re called “cognitive biases,” or “cognitive illusions,” or “cognitive distortions.”

Cognitive biases are judgment shortcuts. They help us to fill in gaps in our information and act decisively despite those gaps. That ability to act decisively helps us act quickly in life and death situations. But let’s be frank: for most of us, these situations are as rare as seeing a shooting star.

We all have cognitive biases. Here are some common cognitive biases:

• Confirmation bias: A tendency to filter information in a way that confirms what we already think. 

• Optimism bias: A tendency to be over-optimistic, and to underestimate the probability of undesirable outcomes. 

• Self-serving bias: A tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. 

• Availability bias: A tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events based on recent and emotional memories.

• Anchoring bias: A tendency to rely too much on one trait or piece of information. 

How Cognitive Biases Damage Us

We now recognize that these cognitive cravings can damage us and the people around us. 

Imagine you just walked into a job interview. You might think that you can impress the interviewers with your experience and problem-solving skills, and you rehearse a number of things to say in response to the questions you expect from them. It turns out, however, that the interviewers make a snap judgment about you: they make their decision in less than a second based on your facial features–a scar on your face, your eye color, the distance between your eyes, and the shape of your mouth–features that reveal nothing about your qualifications.

Princeton University psychologist Alex Todorov did a study about trustworthy faces–we are wired to make a snap judgment about a person within 100 milliseconds of meeting them. 

Snap judgments helped our prehistoric ancestors survive when they saw a new face on the savannah, but it doesn’t help us in the modern world. Today, the negative impact of snap judgments has spread across the world. People make snap judgments based on sex, race, accent, age--the list goes on. 

For example, in a study by Cornell University’s Justin Gunnell, unattractive people tend to get longer and harsher prison sentences than attractive people–on average 22 months longer.

There are many examples of how cravings to make snap judgments impact our society for the worse. So how do we manage these cravings?

How To Deal with Cognitive Biases: First Know, Then Manage

We all have these cognitive cravings because they are byproducts of human evolution. We can’t eliminate them any more than we can eliminate our craving for sugar. The best we can do is take steps to manage them and the effects they have on our lives. 

How do we manage them? There are 2 steps:

Step 1. Accept that cognitive biases are dispositions of the human brain. We can’t eliminate them but only manage them. 

Step 2. Stop acting on them blindly. Instead, reflect carefully on the judgments you make. Understand exactly why you make them before acting on them.

Think back to the interview example. If you’re interviewing a candidate you might not be able to help make a snap judgment about them. But try to understand the basis of that judgment: Is it a facial feature? Is it something about the way the person dresses or talks? Is it something that is in any way relevant to evaluating the person’s qualifications for the job? If not, then put the judgment aside and focus on what matters. 

In addition, be open to other people’s evaluations and criticisms about your judgment. Other people might have had the same initial impression, and may have been able to judge the candidate’s qualifications more clearly in the moment.

The Wisdom Seeker Approach to Cognitive Bias

Wisdom seekers are committed to knowing and understanding what is true. wisdom seekers accept that they have cognitive biases since there is no way to eliminate them. wisdom seekers understand that having cognitive biases and acting on them are two different things. 

When it comes to important decisions–accepting a job offer, voting for a political candidate, deciding on your new home, choosing a life partner, etc.–wisdom seekers approach decisions based on evidence to avoid the blind spots that biases cause. Finally, when there isn’t enough evidence in the decision-making process, a wisdom seeker withholds judgment till more evidence becomes available. 

Gullible: “I heard from Andrew Yang that universal income is the best solution to fight poverty.”

Me: “Why do you believe that?”

Gullible: “Yang is successful and famous, so he must be right.”

This is a common informal fallacy called “The appeal to authority.”

What Is an Appeal to Authority Fallacy?

Appeal to authority arguments look to support a claim by appeal to the person who’s making the claim. Since claims are true or false regardless of who makes them, the person who’s making the claim is irrelevant to evaluating the claim’s truth or falsity. That’s why appeal to authority is categorized among the fallacies of relevance: it appeals to irrelevant information in an effort to get people to endorse a claim.

For example, if Einstein claims that happy marriage starts when you marry your first love, that doesn’t automatically make the claim true. Einstein was a genius physicist, but that doesn’t mean everything he says is true. Accepting a claim simply because of who’s saying it is a fallacy: a person’s say-so doesn’t show that the claim is true. The truth or falsity of a claim is completely independent of the person who makes it.  

Some other names for the appeal to authority are “Argument from authority,” “Argumentum ad verecundiam,” and “Ipse dixit.” It’s a common fallacy of relevance like a genetic fallacy, straw man fallacy, or appeal to popularity. 

Here’s what appeal to authority looks like:

“We should all make climate change our number-one priority because Leonardo DiCaprio said so.” 

This is a logical fallacy because hearing a claim from a famous movie star doesn’t make the claim true. 

Appeal to authority is different from relying on expert opinion. We obviously need to rely on expert opinion in some cases. If you want to understand what’s wrong with your car, you need to consult a mechanic. If you want to understand your taxes, you need to consult an accountant. If you want to understand something about the COVID-19 pandemic, you need to start with a virologist. But even experts can be wrong. Anybody can have false beliefs, and experts are no different. 

Expert knowledge is limited by the expert’s area of expertise. For example, if you need to understand heart health, you’d want to start with a specialist in cardiology. They would have scientific evidence based on medical records to back up their claims. But if you want to understand mental health, a specialist in cardiology will have limited knowledge on the subject. 

The appeal to authority fallacy is at work when someone uses the words of an expert in one domain to provide evidence for a claim in some other domain. The Einstein example illustrates this. Einstein was an expert in physics—a true authority figure in that domain. If Einstein said something about physics, that would give you some reason to think it was true; he was an expert in that domain. But he wasn’t an expert on marriage. To take his say-so as evidence in this other domain would be to appeal to an irrelevant authority—a false authority. It would be to commit an appeal to authority fallacy.

Appeal to Authority as the Mirror Image of Ad Hominem 

Appeal to authority is often a mirror image of ad hominem. In an appeal to authority, someone appeals to the positive characteristics of a person to accept a claim, and in ad hominem, someone appeals to negative characteristics of a person to reject a claim. Both appeals are fallacious because the characteristics of the person are irrelevant to whether the person’s claim is true.

Appeal to Authority

Sam says there is an afterlife.

Sam is a saint.

So, there is an afterlife.

Ad Hominem

Sam says that there is an afterlife.

Sam is a devil.

So, there is no afterlife.

Contrast the earlier Einstein example with another: if Hitler claims that 2 +2 =4, that doesn’t automatically make the claim false. People with positive characteristics can still be wrong, and people with negative characteristics can still be right, so discussing personal characteristics instead of the claim itself is a fallacy. 

Here are some examples of appeal to authority:

Example #1 

Person A: “Appeal to authority is the weakest form of argument.”

Person B: “Why do you think that?”

Person A: “Aristotle said so.”

Explanation: Person A is appealing to Aristotle to prove that appeal to authority is the weakest form of argument. Appeal to authority is in fact among the weakest forms of argument, but the reason it’s weak isn’t that Aristotle said so. The reason it’s weak is that saying something doesn’t make it true—not even if it’s Aristotle who said it. Aristotle was the father of formal logic. He was the first to try to give an account of a valid argument, and the first to provide a system for identifying logical form, but that doesn’t mean that everything he says is true. 

Example #2

“The Pope said we should not use contraception. Since the Pope is a religious authority, it must be true.”

Explanation: It is a fallacious argument to believe a person instead of evaluating his claim about contraception. If the Pope’s claim is true, it’s not true simply because he says so.

Example #3

“According to Planned Parenthood, women should have the ability to choose abortion. Since it’s Planned Parenthood, it must be right.”

Explanation: You can’t accept the claim simply because Planned Parenthood said it. They could be right or wrong, but we can’t accept their claim simply because they provide reproductive health care. If their claim is true, it’s not true simply because they say so.

Example #4 

“Michael Jordan said that for fitness, we should make it mandatory for all children in school to play basketball. Since Michael Jordan was a great basketball player, it must be true.”

Explanation: You can’t accept a claim simply because it’s Jordan. The claim about making basketball mandatory for all children for fitness needs to be evaluated before accepting, rejecting, or withholding judgment about the conclusion. If Jordan’s claim is true, it’s not true simply because he says so.

Appeal to Authority in Advertising

Advertisers have long used appeal to authority to promote their products. They understand that the public can jump on the bandwagon knowing an authority approves their product. Trident Gum used this well-known example:

“Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gums for their patients who chew gum.”

Likewise, Wheaties used a similar ad featuring Michael Jordan. Its message: Wheaties is the best way to start the day because Michael Jordan eats Wheaties for breakfast.

Here’s an example of a New York Ad agency using doctors to sell cigarettes:

“More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!”

How to Disarm Appeal to Authority

Most of the time, people appeal to authority in argumentation because it’s easy. It takes critical thinking skills to argue for or against an argument or claim, and most people aren’t skilled at doing that, so they fall back on something that’s more familiar, easy, and comfortable: evaluating people instead of arguments and claims. 

If someone accepts a claim because of who said it, then point out that the claim still needs to be evaluated before accepting it. By focusing attention back on the claim, you’re bringing the fallacy to light and bringing the discussion back to where it belongs: the evidence in support of the claim. 

Wisdom Seeker Approach to Appeal to Authority

Wisdom seekers are interested in knowing and understanding what’s true, and they are interested in the evidence, not only the source. In every case, the claim needs to be evaluated, not the person who makes it. 

In general, you need to completely remove the person who’s making the claim from your evaluation of the claim. This is the only way to avoid an appeal to authority fallacy and ensure that you’re genuinely focused on knowing and understanding what’s true.

“Be careful when you follow the masses. Sometimes the ‘M’ is silent.” 

-Anonymous (perhaps Unanimous)

I had a conversation with my friend, Majority:

Me: “Buying a house is not always the best investment.”

Majority: “Most people want to buy a house, so it must be the best investment. It’s just common knowledge.”

This is an example of a fallacy in informal logic called “Appeal to Popularity.”

What Is Appeal to Popularity?

Appeal to popularity happens when someone makes a claim based on popular opinion or on a common belief among a specific group of people. My friend Majority thinks that buying a house is the best investment because it’s a popular view. Because it’s popular, he reasons, it must be true. 

Appeal to popularity is an informal fallacy because the popularity of a claim doesn’t provide evidence that the claim is true. Something is not automatically true if it’s popular. If I believe something, that doesn’t make it true. Likewise, if the majority of the people believe something, that doesn’t make it true. 

For example, at one time, everyone believed that the sun orbited the earth, but that claim was false.

Appeal to popularity is also known as the Argumentum Ad Populum, Appeal to the Majority, Appeal to the People, Bandwagon Fallacy, and Consensus Gentium. It is one of the most common logical fallacies along with Ad Verecundiam (aka Appeal to Authority), the Ad Hominem fallacy, and Hasty Generalization. (Note that Douglas Walton discusses a different fallacy that is also called ‘Ad Populum.’)

People are motivated to commit the fallacy because of the bandwagon effect. The bandwagon effect is a cognitive bias. Humans are social animals, and it is common for them to fall for popular beliefs. We have psychological tendencies that promote group living. It’s easier to live in a group if you share the same beliefs as most people in that group, so humans evolved a tendency to believe what most of the people around them believe. 

Here’s how the appeal to popularity fallacy looks:

Everyone thinks that X.

So, X must be true.

When someone uses the appeal to popularity fallacy, they will cite a belief that many, most, or all people hold and claim it to be true. This is a fallacious argument because, as we’ve seen, the majority opinion doesn’t always translate into truth. The majority of people can believe something false. 

There's a difference between truth and belief. You can believe things that are false, and you can disbelieve things that are true. The number of people who believe it doesn’t matter. To be true, a claim has to match how the real world is. It’s not enough for people to believe it. 

Because the truth is different from belief, citing what people–even the majority of people–believe is irrelevant to evaluating a claim’s truth or falsity. That’s why ad populum is categorized among the fallacies of relevance: it appeals to irrelevant information in an effort to get you to endorse a claim.

Here are some more examples of appeal to popularity:

Example #1 

“Most people believe that there is life after death, so there is life after death.”

Example #2

“Most people no longer believe that there is life after death, so there is no life after death.”

Example #3

“Most people believe that COVID-19 was not grown in the lab, so it must be true.”

Example #4

“Most people believe that COVID-19 was grown in the lab, so it must be true.”

Explanation: In each of the four examples, you can see that the claim is based on popular opinion. The claims have nothing to do with how the actual world is, but they instead appeal to the people who endorse the claims. Each claim is based on popular opinion, but that doesn’t help us get to the truth. These are examples of bad arguments. 

Appeal to Popularity in Marketing

Psychologists have long known that group thinking is one of the key components in the decision-making process. From the early 20th century, New York advertisers used appeal to popularity as a tactic to persuade groups of people to buy their products: “We are the number one seller of x, so we are the best.”

How to Disarm the Appeal to Popularity

The way to counter the appeal to popularity is to explain that the majority can be wrong. It helps to have a clear example that illustrates this. For example, at one time everyone believed that the sun orbited the earth, but it turned out that everyone was wrong.

What Should You Do Instead?

A wisdom seeker is interested in knowing and understanding what’s true. To avoid falling for the appeal to popularity, wisdom seekers understand that for critical thinking, they take the source of the claim out of consideration and only focus on the claim itself. The evidence given with any particular claim helps a wisdom seeker decide to either accept, reject, or withhold judgment on any claim.

I had a disagreement with my boss. He insisted that we should move forward on a project his way instead of mine. To make his case, he began criticizing me. 

When I called him out for a personal attack instead of my position, he was tongue-tied. He didn’t even realize his argument was commiting a common fallacy: the ad hominem.

What Is an Ad Hominem Fallacy?

Ad hominem arguments look to falsify a claim by attacking the person who’s making the claim. Since claims are true or false regardless of who makes them, the person who is making the claim is irrelevant to evaluating the claim’s truth or falsity. 

For example, if Hitler claims that 2 + 2 = 4, that doesn’t automatically make the claim false. Hitler is a bad person, but that doesn’t mean that everything he says is false. Dismissing a claim simply because a bad person says it is an example of Ad hominem. 

When people commit an ad hominem fallacy, they are mistaking criticism of a person with criticism of a claim or an argument. The Latin term ‘Ad hominem’ means “to the person.” When people commit an ad hominem fallacy, they’re attacking the arguer in an effort to falsify the arguer’s claim. It’s a fallacy because attacking the person can’t succeed in falsifying the claim. The truth or falsity of the claim is completely independent of the person who makes it.  

Some synonyms for “Ad hominem” include, “Appeal to the person,” “Personal abuse,” “Verbal abuse fallacy,” “Name-calling,”  “Ad hominem attack,” and “Argumentum ad hominem.” 

Here’s what ad hominem looks like:

Alex: “We should have free college for all, so more people can get a college degree.” 

Jen: “No, college shouldn’t be free. You’re just a hippie.” 

This is a logical fallacy because attacking the person with abusive remarks or name-calling does not prove the claim to be false. Even if Alex is a hippie, that doesn’t give us any reason to think that what Alex says is false. Alex could just as easily say that 2 + 2 = 4. Would Jen reject that claim as well? 

An argument is bad because of its logic, not because of the person who makes it.

Ad Hominem as the Mirror Image of Appeal to Authority

Ad hominem is often a mirror image of appeal to authority. In ad hominem, someone appeals to negative characteristics of a person to reject a claim, and in an appeal to authority, someone appeals to the positive characteristics of a person to accept a claim. Both appeals are fallacious because the characteristics of the person are irrelevant to whether the person’s claim is true.

 Ad Hominem    

Sam, "There is an afterlife."

Sam is a devil.

So, there is no afterlife.

Appeal to Authority         

Sam, "There is an afterlife."

Sam is a saint.

So, there is an afterlife.

Contrast the earlier Hitler example with another: If Mother Teresa claims that you should give money to the poor, that doesn’t automatically make the claim true. 

People with negative characteristics can still be right, and people with positive characteristics can still be wrong, so discussing personal characteristics instead of the claim itself is a fallacy. 

Some common traits that people think are either negative or positive are based on people’s social, physical, personality or characteristic traits. Examples include being rude or polite, being obese or thin, being a man or a woman, being loud or quiet, being conservative or liberal, being rich or poor, being a KKK member or an ACLU donor. All and all, it could be any characteristic of a person that factors into an ad hominem. 

Ad hominem is so common because evaluating people is so familiar to us. It’s one of the first things we learn to do in childhood. Because that way of evaluating things is so familiar, people tend to default to it even when it’s irrelevant. This results in ad hominem being one of the most common fallacies—like tu quoque or straw man. 

Here are some examples of personal attack, aka ad hominem:

Example #1

Anderson Cooper said, “We should eliminate the death penalty because it is inhuman,” but Cooper is a left-leaning political head, so his claim must be false.

Explanation: It doesn’t matter what political party Anderson Cooper endorses; we are evaluating his claim about the death penalty, so we need to remove Cooper from the equation to avoid an ad hominem fallacy.

Example #2

James said, “College is a waste of time.” Since James didn’t go to college, he has to be wrong.

Explanation: Again, we’ll need to look at James’s claim rather than his background. He could very well be wrong, but we can’t dismiss his claim based on whether or not he went to college.

Example #3 

Trump said, “The USA is the best place to start a business because the tax rates are so low for small businesses.” Since Trump is a pig in human clothing, this claim is false.

Explanation: You can’t reject an argument simply because it comes from someone you dislike. The argument itself needs to be evaluated before accepting, rejecting, or withholding judgment about the conclusion.

Example #4

Rob says that we shouldn’t have affirmative action. But Rob isn’t a minority, so we should reject that claim.

Explanation: Again, we will need to look at Rob’s claim rather than his background. He could very well be wrong, but we can’t dismiss what he says simply because of his genetics. 

Example #5

Sally says we should help the poor, but she grew up in a rich family, so she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. 

Explanation: We will need to evaluate Sally’s claim rather than her upbringing. She could very well be wrong, but we can’t dismiss what she says simply because of her family’s economic circumstances. 

How to Disarm Personal Attack

Most of the time, people resort to ad hominem attacks because evaluating people is something they learned from an early age. It takes skills to argue against a good argument or claim, and most people aren’t skilled at doing it, so they fall back on something that’s more familiar, easy, and comfortable: evaluating people instead of arguments and claims. 

If someone attacks you and not your claim, then point out that it is the claim that needs to be evaluated not the person making it. By focusing attention back on the claim, you’re bringing the fallacy to light and bringing the discussion to a more productive place.

Also, politicians are notorious for using dirty tricks to attempt character assassination. Next time you hear them talk about their opponents, be on the lookout for personal attacks that altogether avoid dealing with the opponent’s argument. 

Wisdom Seeker Approach to Ad Hominem

Wisdom seekers are interested in knowing and understanding what’s true, and they are interested in the evidence, not the source. In every case, the claim needs to be evaluated, not the person who makes it. 

In general, you need to completely remove the person who’s making the claim from your evaluation of the claim. This is the only way to avoid an ad hominem fallacy and ensure that you’re genuinely focused on knowing and understanding what’s true.

I had a conversation the other day with my friend, Hasty:

Me: “Canada has a good public health system: they provide care to 100% of their population.”

Hasty: “The Canadian healthcare system sucks! One of my friends from Canada goes to the United States for every medical procedure he needs; otherwise, he’d have to wait at a public hospital.”

This is an example of a logical fallacy called “Hasty Generalization.”

Hasty generalization happens when someone draws a conclusion based on a sample that is too small to support it. My friend Hasty took a sample of literally one person to counter my claim that Canada, home to 37 million people, has a good healthcare system.

What is Hasty Generalization?

Every generalization starts with an initial sample of things of a certain kind and then makes a claim about all things of that kind, for example: 

All the ravens I’ve ever seen are black.

Therefore, all ravens are black. 

A generalization is stronger or weaker depending on the size of the initial sample. Hasty generalizations are weak generalizations. A generalization is hasty when we endorse a general claim without having observed a sample large enough to be confident that the claim is true. 

Consider an example. The circle below is populated with letters. Here’s a general claim about the letters:

(R) All the letters in the circle are rs.

How confident can you be that this claim is true? Compare two observations:

Observation A shows you only a small sample of the letters. Observation B shows a much larger sample. It should be clear that Observation B provides you with stronger evidence that claim (R) is true. By contrast, Observation A provides you with very weak evidence that claim (R) is true. 

If you were to endorse (R) based on an insufficient sample, like Observation A, instead of a larger observed sample, like Observation B, you’d be committing a hasty generalization fallacy.

Hasty generalization is a fallacy because someone is drawing a general conclusion based on a sample size that is too small to support that conclusion. They are jumping to a conclusion “too fast”–that is, without acquiring sufficient evidence to justify the conclusion. 

The hasty generalization fallacy is a common fallacy like the straw man fallacy, the slippery slope fallacy, and ad hominem. Fallacies in general have this characteristic: even if their premises are true, they still fall short of telling you whether the conclusion is true or false. In the above example, if you observe only three letters in the circle, you still can’t tell whether (R) is likely true or false. 

Other names for hasty generalization include “Fallacy of the lonely fact,” “Statistic of small numbers,” “Faulty generalization,” “Overgeneralization,” “Hasty induction,” and “Unrepresentative sample.” 

Many people are tempted to commit the hasty generalization fallacy because they draw general conclusions based on their own experience. The problem is that their experience provides only a sample size of 1, and that sample size is insufficient to support most generalizations.

Here are some more examples of hasty generalization:

Example #1

“My mom smoked for over 60 years and never had any health issues, so cigarette smoking is not that bad for your health.”

Example #2

A food company claims on social media, “Men prefer the smell of bacon in the morning because 4 out of 5 men in our office do.”

Example #3

“I went on a Paleo diet for 3 months and lost 10 pounds. So anyone who goes on a Paleo diet will lose weight.”

Explanation: In each of these three examples, the arguer has insufficient evidence to support a general claim that’s being endorsed. Each arguer takes a sample that is too small to support that more general claim. To support the claim about smokers, a larger sample of cigarette smokers needs to be examined. To support the claim about food companies, a larger population of men needs to be obtained. To support Paleo fan’s claim, more people need to try the diet to have a large enough sample.  

How to Counter the Fallacy of Hasty Generalization

Countering the hasty generalization fallacy requires improving your critical thinking skills. Fallacious thinking stems, in this case, from using a sample that is too small to support a general claim. So to counter a hasty generalization you need to point out one thing:

The sample is too small to make an accurate judgment about the entire class.

What Should You Do Instead?

To avoid making hasty generalizations yourself, you need to make sure that you don’t make general claims based on relatively small samples. Instead, withhold judgment about general claims until you’ve made enough observations to support them.

Wisdom seekers make generalizations that are only as strong as the available evidence, and they’re open to revising their judgments because of that. The strength of your commitment to a generalization should only be as strong as the evidence that supports it. Even if you have a relatively large sample to support a generalization, your commitment to that generalization should still be open to revision as new evidence comes to light. 

People make hasty generalizations all the time. Being a wisdom seeker requires you to go against the crowd. It requires you to withhold judgment about claims that others are willing to endorse, and it positions you to be able to explain why their arguments are weak.

Many people formed their first impression of Kamala Harris during the democratic primary debate. She argued that when Biden was a Senator he voted for a bill that opposed bussing. There was a little girl in California, she said, who was bussed to school every day. “That little girl,” she said, “was me.”

Many people watching the debate were moved by what Harris said. The problem is that her remarks to Biden committed a logical fallacy.

The purpose of the debate was to help discover the strongest candidate for the party. A fair evaluation of Biden’s credentials would have included a range of factors. By focusing on only one incident, Harris was misrepresenting Biden’s record. 

Biden had in fact worked on hundreds of bills to eliminate segregation and move civil rights forward. By focusing on just one example, Harris was constructing a false image of her opponent and then attacking that false image. Why? Because the false image was easier to attack than the real man. 

There’s a name for this kind of misrepresentation. It’s called a “straw man.” 

What is a Straw Man?

The straw man is a logical fallacy that replaces something (a person, a viewpoint, an argument) with a distorted version that blows the original out of proportion to make it easier to attack. It’s one of the most common fallacies–like a hasty generalization, ad hominem, or slippery slope.

The term “straw man” is based on a metaphor. The arguer doesn’t attack the “real man,” that is, the real person, argument, or claim. The arguer instead constructs a fake man made of straw, and then attacks that straw man. The arguer then claims to have defeated the real person, argument, or claim, even though the arguer hasn’t said anything about it. That’s where the fallacy comes in: you can’t defeat something you don’t deal with at all. The arguer can’t win the argument because he hasn’t dealt with the real person, argument, or claim; he has dealt solely with the straw man.

People use straw man fallacies knowingly or unknowingly to avoid challenging a stronger opponent. Politicians often make use of the straw man to attack opponents. They create a distorted image of an opponent’s position or an opponent’s argument by magnifying some things and minimizing others, then attack the distorted image. Harris’ attack on Biden is an example.

Here’s another example that illustrates what a straw man fallacy looks like:

Wife: “I’d rather go to a beach than a big city.”

Husband: “Why do you hate big cities?”

Explanation: The husband has constructed a straw man of the wife’s claim. The wife never said that she doesn’t like big cities. The husband instead misrepresents what she says to make her preferences seem more extreme than they are. 

Many people construct straw men accidentally because the misrepresented view resembles the original. A straw man can even fool the person who made the original claim: the wife might get tricked into defending the straw man that her husband has constructed, and never steer the conversation back to her original claim. 

Here are some more examples of a straw man argument:

Example #1: 

Mom: “I want you to leave your phone on the kitchen counter at night so you can get a better night’s sleep.”

Son: “You never want me to talk to my friends.” 

Explanation: Mom never mentioned anything about her son not talking to friends. The son is attacking her request by distorting it. 

Example #2: 

Person A: “Nuclear energy provides a safe, reliable way of combating climate change.” 

Person B: “I don’t want nuclear waste in my backyard!”

Explanation: A real argument against Person A’s claim would try to show that nuclear energy is not a safe, reliable way to combat climate change. Instead of trying to show that, however, Person B attacks another claim that is not relevant to what Person A said. Person A didn’t say anything about storing nuclear waste in Person B’s backyard. Person B is taking a complex claim and replacing it with a simpler, unrelated claim that’s easier to attack. 

Example #3: 

John: “The new $6 Trillion federal government budget is going to inflate the US dollar because it’s just printing more money.”

Explanation: Whether or not the budget will trigger inflation is a complex issue. By focusing on just one part of the budget, John is oversimplifying the real-world complexities in order to make the budget easier to attack. In particular, John doesn’t take into consideration other parts of the budget that aim to grow revenue by raising taxes. 

How to Disarm a Straw Man

Knowing how to disarm a straw man is an important critical thinking skill. It involves describing the difference between the real thing and the misrepresentation of it. In other words, disarming a straw man has two components: 

1. Describing the real issue (person, view, or argument); 

2. Explaining why the issue (image, view, or argument) that’s being attacked isn’t the real one.

For example, to disarm her husband’s straw man, the wife can reply as follows: “I said that I prefer the beach over the big city; I never said that I hate big cities.”

To disarm her son’s straw man, the mom should reply as follows: “I said that I want you to sleep better by leaving your phone on the counter; I never said that I don’t want you to talk with your friends.”

To disarm Person B’s straw man, Person A should reply as follows: “I said we should look into nuclear energy as a safe and reliable way to combat climate change. I didn’t say anything about storing nuclear waste in your backyard.”

To disarm John’s straw man, you can reply as follows: “The budget is very complex. There are parts of it that aim to grow revenue by raising taxes. It might be the case that the revenue generated by higher taxes is enough to offset inflation.”

Build a Steel Man Instead

Wisdom seekers are concerned with knowing and understanding what’s true. When it comes to evaluating other people’s arguments and viewpoints, they don’t misrepresent others’ arguments to make them seem weaker. They respond to the real argument. At their best, they go a step further than that: they reconstruct opposing arguments to make them as strong as possible. In other words, they don’t build straw men; they build steel men. 

Wisdom seekers know that people aren’t always skilled at formulating the best arguments for a view. So they take the burden on themselves to formulate the best versions of those arguments. Constructing a version of an argument that’s stronger than the original is the opposite of constructing a straw man.

Wisdom seekers construct steel men because they’re committed to knowing and understanding what’s true, and they know that to achieve that goal, they need to evaluate the best defenses for and against various claims. 

By contrast, straw man-building is motivated by a tribal mindset that seeks to defeat opponents at any cost—even at the cost of knowing what’s true.