Hey what’s up Thinkers! Kathy Gibbens here…
Let’s start off by doing a quick review of a fallacy we covered earlier this season, the Argument to the Future fallacy. Do you want to hit pause real quick and see if you can remember what the Argument to the Future fallacy is? The Argument to the Future fallacy happens when someone tries to get you to accept a certain conclusion by saying that future evidence will support it, even though there’s no evidence to support it now.
So, the question to ask yourself if someone is appealing to the future is really simple: “Do you have any real evidence to back up your claim?”
If you want to review or hear more about this fallacy, go back & check out Episode 155.
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Alright, let’s dive into today’s new fallacy, the Just In Case Fallacy. The Just in Case fallacy happens when someone tries to get you to do something based on an extremely rare potential outcome that they don’t really have any proof is very likely to happen. This fallacy is also sometimes called the Better Safe Than Sorry fallacy.
Here’s a simple example: Your cousin, Landon, is trying to convince you that you should always carry a raincoat with you everywhere you go…even on sunny days. He says, “Dude, you need that raincoat, just in case it starts pouring, you don’t want to get wet because you’d have to spend the entire rest of the day soaking wet with soggy socks!” Now, is there anything wrong with carrying a raincoat? No, there’s not, but for Landon to try to convince you to carry one on sunny days just in case it rains feels a little extreme, but the real clincher is in the reasoning he gives: soggy socks. Usually, when someone is committing the Just in Case fallacy, the reasoning they give for whatever they’re trying to get you to do is overexaggerated or very unlikely to happen.
For example: if I were to tell my daughter that she needs to wear a helmet while she’s playing Monopoly with her cousins just in case she gets over-excited and falls off her chair & hits her head on the floor, you can clearly see that my reasoning for wearing the helmet is over exaggerated. The chances of her falling off her chair & hitting her head during a game of Monopoly is so small that it’s silly for me to even bring it up.
You may have already guessed that the Just In Case Fallacy is a version of an Appeal to Fear. When someone commits this fallacy, they’re trying to make you afraid of something that’s really not very likely to happen.
A real life example of this fallacy happens when you make a purchase. Let’s say you’re buying a cell phone. And the person selling you the phone asks if you want insurance on your phone. Now, there may not be anything wrong with that, unless they start getting strangely specific and they ask if you want to add on coverage for lightning strikes, just in case your cell phone happens to get left out in an open field during a thunderstorm and gets hit by lighting…you wouldn’t want to have to buy a new phone if that happened, right? Ok, do you see the fallacy? They’re playing to the fear of a scenario that’s very unlikely to happen to try to get you to pay extra money for something that you really don’t need, hoping you wouldn’t notice that the cost of the insurance premiums over time might far exceed the potential cost of repairing or replacing the phone.
Question to ask yourself: “What are the chances of that thing really happening?” *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?”
