Your eyes turn into dollar signs and a cha-ching noise goes off in your brain: Wal-Mart has deep pockets. You’ve got a client who was grocery shopping at Wal-Mart, and in the produce aisle she slipped on a grape that had fallen on the floor and injured herself. One more example: suppose you’re one of those sleazy personal injury lawyers-an “ambulance chaser”. We’ve all known it’s a fallacy since we were little kids, the first time we did something wrong because all of our friends were doing it, too, and our moms asked us, “If all of your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do that too?” The advertisement assures us that a certain television show is #1 in the ratings-with the tacit conclusion being that we should be watching, too. The ads are trying to engage your emotions to get you thinking positively about their product.Īn extremely common technique, especially for advertisers, is to appeal to people’s underlying desire to fit in, to be hip to what everybody else is doing, not to miss out. What does sexiness have to do with how good a beer tastes? Nothing. Think of all the ads with sexy models schilling for cars or beers or whatever. This is a fallacious appeal to emotion.Īdvertisers do it, too. Political ads inevitably try to suggest to voters that one’s opponent will take away medical care or leave us vulnerable to terrorists, or some other scary outcome-usually without a whole lot in the way of substantive proof that these fears are at all reasonable. Fear is perhaps the most commonly exploited emotion for politicians. There are as many different versions of the appeal to emotion as there are human emotions. He stoked these emotions with explicit denunciations of Jews and non-Germans, promises of the return of glory for the Fatherland-but also using the sorts of techniques we canvassed above, with awesome settings and hyper-sensational speechifying. He played on Germans’ fears and prejudices, their economic anxieties, their sense of patriotism and nationalistic pride. He was an expert at the appeal to emotion. But, the thought is, we shouldn’t decide whether or not to believe things based on an emotional response emotions are a distraction, blocking hard-headed, rational analysis. It’s notoriously effective to play on people’s emotions to get them to go along with you, and that’s the technique identified here. The Latin name of this fallacy literally means “argument to the people,” where ‘the people’ is used in the pejorative sense of “the unwashed masses,” or “the fickle mob”-the hoi polloi. (Many of the fallacies have Latin names, because, as we noted, identifying the fallacies has been an occupation of logicians since ancient times, and because ancient and medieval work comes down to us in Latin, which was the language of scholarship in the West for centuries.) People who use these techniques with malicious intent are attempting to distract their audience from the central questions they’re supposed to be addressing, allowing them to appear to win an argument that they haven’t really engaged in.Īppeal to Emotion ( Argumentum ad Populum) These fallacies are often called “Fallacies of Relevance” because they involve arguments that are bad insofar as the reasons given are irrelevant to the issue at hand. What they all have in common is that they involve arguing in such a way that issue that’s supposed to be under discussion is somehow sidestepped, avoided, or ignored. We will discuss five informal fallacies under this heading. Appeal to Force (Argumentum ad Baculum).Appeal to Emotion (Argumentum ad Populum).
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