Hey what’s up Thinkers! Kathy Gibbens here…
Let’s start off today with a quick review of a fallacy we covered earlier in the podcast: the Anecdotal Fallacy. People commit the Anecdotal Fallacy when they base a conclusion on an isolated personal experience or on a very small sample size rather than looking at the actual evidence or using a good argument. For instance, if I said, “Petting cats makes you sick. I pet my neighbor’s cat last week and now I have a cold.” You can probably see the fallacy pretty easily. Just b/c something happened to me once doesn’t mean it’s true.
The Question to ask yourself if you’re facing an Anecdotal Fallacy is this: “Is that really true or is it just an isolated event or experience?”
If you want to review or hear more about this fallacy, check out Episode 44.
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Alright, today’s new fallacy has a funny name: it’s called the Toupee Fallacy. Yes, you heard that right…toupee, like the little wig that men who are balding wear. The Toupee Fallacy goes like this, “All toupees look fake - I’ve never seen one that couldn’t tell was a fake!” It’s basically saying, “You can’t fool me!” This fallacy is actually a form of the Appeal to Ignorance in that it selectively ignores some un-knowable things. Here’s what I mean. This person is saying they’ve recognized every toupee they’ve seen and could tell it’s a fake. BUT, what about all the toupees they DIDN’T recognize?? How many of those are there? There’s no way to tell! The reality is, they don’t know how many they’ve missed b/c they missed them! They could have seen 10 toupees and didn’t recognize them, but they caught the next 5. Well, that’s not a real great track record, is it?
Here’s another example of the Toupee Fallacy: A sales manager says, “I’ve seen every trick in the book that employees try to pull and I can spot them a mile away.” Ok, really? You may be able to pick out a lot of employee tricks in your industry, but that doesn’t mean you know ALL of them or can pick out ALL of them.
The problem with the thinking here is that you don’t know what you don’t know. There’s no way to identify the things you’ve missed…it could be a lot of it could be just a few, but either way - you don’t know how many! Someone described it this way: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Another example of the toupee fallacy comes from Donald Trump, in a tweet he made back in 2012, before he even ran for president. His tweet said, “I always enjoy watching young entrepreneurs enter the business world. I can tell who reads my books and who doesn’t.” Ok, really? You can probably see the toupee fallacy pretty simply there.
So, the question to ask yourself if you think you’re facing a Toupee Fallacy is this: “How do you know for sure? Isn’t it possible that you may have missed a few?” *repeat*
Oh! And I wanted to be sure to invite you to take the Meme Fallacy Quiz! It’s a short, fun quiz that has several memes that I came across online, each one containing a fallacy. How well will you do at recognizing and naming each one? You can take the quiz at: filteritthroughabraincell.com/quiz
Remember: When you learn HOW to think, you will no longer fall prey to those who are trying to tell you what THEY want you to think and it all starts with asking one simple question: “Is that really true?”
