Hey what’s up Thinkers! Kathy Gibbens here…
Let’s start off today with a quick review of a fallacy we covered earlier this season, The Non Sequitur Fallacy. Do you want to hit pause for a quick second and test yourself to see if you can remember what a Non Sequitur is? So first of all, Non Sequitur is a Latin phrase that means “it does not follow”. So a Non-Sequitur Fallacy happens when someone draws a conclusion that doesn’t logically follow from the stated premise.
The question to ask yourself when you’re faced with a Non-Sequitur fallacy is a simple one: “Is that even a logical conclusion?”
If you want to hear more about this fallacy, check out Episode 78.
Today’s new fallacy is the Biased Generalization Fallacy. This one sometimes involves statistics and can get a little complicated, so we’re going to keep it super simple here today. A Biased Generalization happens when you come to a conclusion about a group of people based on a small sample group that already has a bias about the topic.
Here’s a simple example of what I mean. Let’s say I was going to find out what percentage of people are dog people and what percentage of people are cat people. To find out, I go to our local dog park and talk to 20 people. All 20 people say they’re dog people, so I conclude that 100% of people are dog people! Ok, can you see the problem here? I made a conclusion about the general population based off asking a very small group of people who clearly already had a bias…I was at a dog park, so clearly all the people there had dogs! How accurate is my conclusion?
Now, it may be helpful to define what a bias is. The oxford dictionary defines bias as “a prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair.” In simple terms, your bias is how you see the world. And we usually tend to think of having a bias as being a bad thing, and it can be, but the reality is, we all have biases! We can’t help it. We all have specific ways we view the world and specific ideas about what we believe to be right & wrong. Now, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look at our biases and maybe challenge them whether they’re true or not, but to say we should have no biases in life is just not possible. And yes, there are several different biases, and I’ll be going into all of them in Season 2 of this podcast!
But getting back to our Biased Generalization fallacy, here’s another example. Let’s say I was trying to convince parents that they should homeschool their kids and I wanted to show them that homeschooling is really popular. So, I go to a homeschool convention and ask parents there what they think about homeschooling. Ok, can you see that I’m going to get a very biased result? Everyone there is either already homeschooling or is interested in homeschooling. It’s not going to be a result that’s representative of the general population. Now, if I went to , say, a public park and asked my question, I would likely get a more accurate idea of what the general public thinks.
What’s wrong with the thinking here is that if you ask an already biased group of people a question, they’re not going to be representative of the general population. Sometimes people commit this fallacy on purpose, to make their statistics more dramatic in their favor. I need to do an episode sometime on statistics b/c it’s VERY easy to manipulate statistics to say almost anything you want them to say, so you have to know how to read & ask good questions about the statistics you’re presented with. And, yes, this fallacy is similar to a Hasty Generalization Fallacy, which we covered in episode 38.
This sometimes happens in politics. Let’s say the Republican party wants to find out what people think about that topic, so they decide to send out a questionnaire or a poll. However, they only send the poll to people on their list of registered Republicans! Do you think they’re going to get a good feel for what the general population thinks about that topic? No, of course not. Those people are already biased in a certain direction or they wouldn’t be registered Republicans.
So, the question to ask yourself if you think you’re facing a Biased Generalization is this: “Are the people they asked biased in some way?” *repeat*
Remember: When you learn HOW to think, you will no longer fall prey to those who are trying to tell you what THEY want you to think and it all starts with asking one simple question: “Is that really true?”
