Hey what’s up Thinkers! Kathy Gibbens here…
Welcome back to the podcast where you get a little smarter each time you listen! Let’s start off by reviewing a fallacy we covered earlier this season: The Relativist Fallacy.Ok, this fallacy is being committed right, left and center these days, so hit pause real quick and see if you can remember what this fallacy is. The Relativist Fallacy happens when someone says there is no objective truth. That your subjective ‘truth’ is true and my subjective ‘truth’ is true, even when they don’t agree. Did that sound confusing? Let me say it like this: have you ever heard someone say, “That may be true for you, but it’s not true for me?” That’s the Relativist Fallacy.
So, the question to ask yourself if you’re facing the Relativist Fallacy is super simple and it’s the one I ask every single week:: “Is that really true?”
If it’s been a hot minute since you listened to the episode on this fallacy, definitely go back and check out Episode 83, because you need to know about Relativism!
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Ok, let’s dive into today’s new fallacy: Cherry Picking. Cherry Picking happens when someone focuses only on the evidence that supports their claim while ignoring any evidence that doesn’t. This fallacy is also sometimes called the Fallacy of Incomplete Evidence.
Here’s a simple example: Let’s say you’re trying to convince your parents that it’s a good idea for you to drink soda all day instead of water. So, you do an internet search to try to find some sources that will support your argument. You find 378 articles that talk about how unhealthy it is to drink soda, but you find one random study that one of the soda companies sponsored that somehow says soda drinking isn’t that bad. Boom! You’ve got your evidence! You print off that one article and take it to your parents to help you make your point. Ok, that’s obviously a made-up example, but you get the point. You Cherry-Picked which articles you were going to share with your parents to try to make it look like your idea was a good one, while purposely leaving out all the evidence to the contrary.
Another classic example of Cherry Picking is resumes! When you write a resume to get a job, you’re doing a form of Cherry Picking - you pick out the highlights of your education and your work history to present a picture of yourself that is favorable to potential employers. People don’t typically put the project that failed on their resume because they don’t want to make themselves look bad.
Along those lines, we could probably say that much of what we see on social media has been Cherry Picked as well. People usually post their good days, their best pictures, their favorite memories and the highlights of their life to post on social media. You’re often not seeing their bad hair days, messy closets and the bathroom that needs to be cleaned.
The problem behind Cherry Picking is probably pretty obvious to you: You’re not getting all the information. Either someone isn’t telling you all the information, either on accident and often, purposely. When someone purposely doesn’t give all the information, it’s a form of manipulation. They’re purposely trying to make you believe something and are only presenting you with evidence that supports what they want you to believe…they’re manipulating your view of their claim! And that’s why it’s so important to learn how to think for yourself and ask good questions. Good thinking makes you really hard to manipulate!
Another way this fallacy can happen is when someone chooses to disregard any evidence that goes against what they want to believe to be true. This tends to happen to people especially when they come up against evidence that goes against a strongly held value or belief & they’re just not open to anything that might challenge their beliefs or cause them to possibly change their mind.
An example of Cherry Picking happened recently in our country. There was a person who had gone into a Christian school and killed 6 people, 3 of which were children. This person had written a manifesto where she described what she was thinking and exactly why she had done this. However, that manifesto was never released. The story that was told by many of the press & news outlets completely left out any of the information that was on this manifesto (because it wasn’t released) and excluded the fact that the victims were targeted because they were Christians. In essence, they Cherry Picked the information they gave out about what had happened in order to create a specific narrative about the shooter, namely that she was the real victim. Crazy, huh? By the way, when this happens, it’s called Evidence Suppression, and it’s one of the ways people commit the Cherry Picking fallacy.
So, the question to ask yourself: “Is there more to this story that I don’t know?” *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?”
