Common Logical Fallacies in Businesses

This is part of a series of posts about operational performance, customer success, and decision-making, as well as more general topics about work and life. Some of these are published earlier elsewhere, and the newsletter #zenofbusiness is designed to bring these together for you.

This edition is about flaws in logical reasoning, known as "fallacies", how to identify them, and work with them. In university, I took part in debates. Won some, lost several. But some learnings from those days endure. Knowing about these fallacies and working with them helps in wit, persuasion, and decision making, both in personal and in professional sphere. Happy reading!

#intelligence #logicalreasoning #management #decisionmaking

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In most of our interactions, we use rhetoric, logic, and expressions of thought to take decisions or actions, narrate them, rally support for them, or justify them. All this is an adjacent part of the fascinating field of Decision Making, of which I happen to be a lifelong learner.

Logical reasoning is an integral part of social sciences, including management, and provides one of the bases of what can be considered as “intelligence”. In the environment charged with discussions and debates about intelligence and the comparisons, differences, similarities, and ethics between human / artificial intelligence, it is essential to understand logical reasoning as a human faculty that can be generated artificially through computing devices.

What is logical reasoning? At the heart of this question lies human nature. Humans are social animals; this is known, and some are more social than others. But they are also “argumentative” in their social nature. I use the word “argumentative” as a measure of fact, i.e. epistemically, rather than as a measure of value (good/bad), i.e. qualitatively. All our social interactions with others as well as with ourselves are by means of “arguments”.

An “argument”, according to the ancient Indian treatise of Nyayashastra, as well as modern understanding of logic, has two parts, the “premise” (or premises) and the “conclusion”. ?The premise(s) are “grounds” for judgement of a factual claim, which is the conclusion. Thus:

Premise(s) -> grounds of judgement -> Conclusion

This ‘grounds of judgement’ is the logical relationship between the premise(s) and the conclusion, which is called ‘reasoning’ or the ‘argument’. For example, most people who work with computers or other digital screens tend to have strain on their eyes. It is therefore concluded that working for long duration with screens strains human eyes. This is a typical “cause-effect” type of argument. Consider another example: a sample of customers surveyed liked the new visual IVR we introduced. We therefore conclude that all customers like the new IVR system. This is an example of an argument commonly used in market research or voice of customer (VOC) studies.

The reasoning could be deductive or top-down, i.e., going from general to specific (like the example of screens affecting eyesight), or it could be inductive or bottom-up, i.e., drawing a conclusion by going from specific to general (like the example of surveys leading to understanding the entire customer base). All cause-effect examples are examples of deductive logic. This can be used for root-cause analysis, troubleshooting, and corrective actions. Inductive logic is used for pattern recognition, generalization, and forecasting. Deductive logic is good for hypothesis testing, while inductive logic is good for hypothesis creation. See my earlier post (here) that talks about analysis and synthesis.

What is a good argument? If the premise(s) are good and the reasoning is solid and relevant, we have a “sound” logic or a good argument. If the premise(s) are wrong, then we have an “invalid” argument. If the premise(s) are good but the reasoning is faulty, we might have a “valid” argument, but it may not be “sound”. These bad reasonings or bad grounds of judgement are what make bad arguments. Thus, "Fallacies" are the defects in the reasoning that make an argument unsound or bad.

Fallacies are the defects in the reasoning that make an argument unsound or bad.

Take the example of a hasty generalization that all successful businesses are founded by college dropouts; and therefore, if you want to launch a successful business, you should drop out (or should have dropped out) of university. This is not a sound argument, since there are at least a handful of examples of successful businesses started and run by graduate students, and several more examples of failed startups launched by college dropouts. So, even though the premises may be valid, the argument itself is not sound and is "fallacious".

We come across fallacies all the time, which makes it interesting to know what different types they are. There are several fallacies you will see on the Internet, on social media, and in mainstream media. Some of them are so common that we have stopped considering them as fallacies and they have started to shape the psyche of the society.

Consider the fallacy of “False Authority”, or “ad Vericundiam”, which is considering something may be true just because someone famous or authoritative says so, no matter if they do not have any expertise on the subject. This is how we have cricketers and movie / TV stars waxing eloquence on international relations, politics, trade, or human rights.

Or the fallacy of “ad Nauseam”. We keep hearing the same stories repeatedly and start to believe that they are true. Like, for example, some movies being masterpieces even before they hit the screens, or some individuals being philanthropic without knowing what they did.

A common fallacy in news and policies is that of “ad Hominem” or “shooting the messenger”. This fallacy disputes the argument by personally attacking the opponent. We see a lot of trash-labelling on social media, like “woke”, “anti-woke”, “snowflakes”, “positivists”; labels that are made to focus on attacking the people making the arguments instead of the arguments themselves. We see this in corporate world too, where peoples’ opinions are discarded just because they do not have the authority or are from a different team or group.

Increasingly, as the world gets more and more polarized, there is a fallacy of “False Dilemma”, in which the arguer presents only two choices, suggesting that there is no third. “You are either with us, or against us”, as George W. Bush famously declared at the start of his anti-terrorism campaign in 2001.

There are over 125 fallacies in logical reasoning that have been identified and named so far. Here, I am listing eight of the most common fallacies I come across. By doing so, I am using “convenience bias”, i.e., using the data available to me easily, which is another form of defective logic used often by people. But I find these interesting not only because how often we see these around us, especially in the corporate settings, but also because how easy it is to spot them and refute them if required.

There are over 125 fallacies in logical reasoning that have been identified and named so far.

1. The Straw Man

This is a fallacy of introducing a “fake” argument and then refuting it, like fighting a “straw man” that does not exist but is set up for the purpose. A “straw man” is usually an extreme, often caricatured, version of the original argument, and involves putting words into somebody’s mouth that they haven’t said. If as a business leader, you ask one of your managers to improve the productivity of their team, and they start arguing that staff should not spend all their time in productive state, but should have time to learn, socialize, and rest, then it is a “straw man” argument since you did not ask people to stop doing any of those.

A related, but different, type of fallacy is the “slippery slope”, in which the argument is that one action will inevitably lead to a series of other actions (which are bad), and therefore the first action should not be taken. Most of the fearmongering about artificial intelligence (AI) that we see in media these days can be said to fall under this category. Just because one business process can be automated using AI does not follow that humankind is on the verge of annihilation. In another example, outsourcing one type of work to a vendor does not necessarily lead to downfall of the entire economy. You will find Internet trolls use this fallacy quite often.

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2. Tu Quoque (“you too”)

This is the fallacy of defending an error in one’s reasoning by pointing out that the other person has made the same error. Two wrongs do not make one right, but such is the nature of this fallacy. Used effectively by growing young adults on their exasperated parents (“why do you keep asking me to drink milk? Mom doesn’t drink it either”), and often seen in political campaigns where leaders in opposing camps keep calling each other out (famously known as “whataboutery” too), this is part of a common boardroom drama too, where different functions will keep arguing against each other using the “you too” method. Any argument that starts with "you are the one to talk!" is expected to have a tu quoque fallacy.

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3. Sweeping Generalizations (dicto Simpliciter)

This is a fallacy of making a hasty and sweeping statement and expecting it to be true of every specific case (hence the Latin for, “spoken simply”). Sweeping generalizations, or jumping to conclusions, can take many forms. Some of them manifest as our biases, either good or bad. You know what those are.

One of the examples of sweeping generalizations or hasty generalizations that I see often is the “anecdotal evidence” fallacy. This is a fallacy of considering something to be true because someone had one personal experience. Travel writers write about their anecdotal experiences as statements of value (“everyone in Southeast Asia is always smiling”, "the food in Eastern Europe is bland", and so on) and people consider these to be true.

Most CX conferences are filled with talks by “experts” sharing their version of how to manage customer experience by citing that one anecdote from that one visit to that one branch of a company. One good or bad experience does not make a brand. Yet, we continue to suffer these fallacies all the time! (See what I did there? That, right there, is an example of hasty generalization).

The most common examples of sweeping generalizations, in my line of work, are those formed about the voice of customer (VOC), about what the entire population of customers think, feel, or do, based on small focus groups of 6 to 10 customers. The sample may not be representative, or it could be biased. And this leads to hasty generalizations.

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4. Mixing Correlation with Causation (False Cause or “post Hoc”)

One of my favorite fallacies to work on, to bust myths, and to show that the world is full of what Tyler Vigen calls “spurious correlations”, this is a fallacy of assuming something drives something else just because both occur together and change together.

If you painted the office with a fresh quote last month, and this month you saw an increase in absenteeism, it does not follow that the new paint has caused a rise in staff absences. The sales of rock-n-roll music CDs and the price of a barrel of crude oil may be correlated, but one does not cause the other.

This is a common type of the larger type of fallacies called “non sequitur” (it does not follow), in which the conclusion does not follow from the premise(s). When a false cause argument is made after the “effect,” it is referred to in Latin as post hoc ergo propter hoc, which means “after this, therefore because of this.” Hence the name “post hoc”. Most superstitions, whether personal or professional (blaming bad fortune, for example, or blaming the economy), have this fallacy at their base.

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5. Red Herring

A type of ‘non sequitur’ too, this is a fallacy of introducing irrelevant facts or premise(s) to distract from the question. This is seen sometimes when I interview people for the COPC Inc. audits for Customer Experience Operations, or other types of operational assessments.

When they do not have an answer, some people introduce irrelevant facts or arguments to distract from the question at hand.

Why did the performance of new hires drop? Oh, because Marketing came up with a new campaign. What has that got to do with the performance of new hires? Well, they did not know about the new campaign. So, it is not really marketing then, is it? It is the training we provided to the new hires. But we hire only experienced candidates. Why would you bring up the marketing campaign in the first place then?

It takes skill and (sometimes, infinite) patience to bring the discussion back to the main question and follow the argument. Some of you would recognize having gone through several of these excruciating conversations.

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6. Begging the Question (Circular Logic, or “petitio principii”)

This is a fallacy where the conclusion of the argument is part of the premise(s). A fallacy of assuming, when trying to prove something, what it is that you are trying to prove in the argument. “To succeed in life, one need to effectively manage their time because success comes from a balance of work and social time.” This is an example of a circular argument (because, well, it is circular in nature!).

This is a fallacy that is more commonly see than some will care to agree. But whenever you hear the answer to the question “why do so and so” as “because X says so”, you should know that this begs the question “why say so?”.

“Because the clients do not look at the efficiency performance of the centre, we are not reporting this performance”. This argument is circular. Why are you not reporting the data? Because the client does not look at that data. Why do they not look at it? Because it is not reported.

This fallacy often takes the form of “Complex Question”, which is the fallacy of having a question that implicitly assumes something to be true by its construction, such as “have you stopped falsifying your data?”, or "have we finally managed to rectify the problem?", assuming something to be true as part of the statement.

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7. The Bandwagon Fallacy or Appeal to Numbers (ad Numerum or ad Populum)

This common, and often dangerous, fallacy is the attempt to prove something by showing how many people think that it is true. In several boardroom discussions I have witnessed, decisions get taken by rallying support among members of the committee or board, rather than discussing the argument itself. If the majority agrees, we go ahead with the decision, even if we have not fully reasoned its value.

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8. Appeal to tradition (ad Antiquitatem)

This is the most common fallacy that I come across as a consultant. Whenever we ask people why they do certain things in certain ways, the answer usually is, “well, we have been doing this for the last twenty years”. This is the same familiar argument that some policy, behavior, or practice is right or acceptable because “it has always been done that way”.

The most common type of naturalistic fallacy, i.e., a fallacy of assuming that whatever is “natural” or consistent with “nature” (somehow defined) is good, the fallacy of appealing to tradition leads to the behavior of “inaction inertia” in the people as well as organizations.

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That's the round-up of the common fallacies I would like to talk about today.

1. Straw man - introducing and refuting an exaggerated statement; related: slippery slope
2. Tu quoque - "you too", or pointing other's error
3. Hasty generalization - expecting something to be true all the time; related: anecdotal evidence
4. Mixing Correlation with Causation, or "post Hoc" - spurious correlation, no causality
5. Red Herring - irrelevant facts to distract from the main question
6. Begging the Question - trying to prove something by assuming it is true; related: Complex Question (assuming something to be true)
7. Bandwagon Fallacy or ad Numerum - appeal to numbers, considering to be true because most agree with it
8. Appeal to Tradition or ad Antiquitatem - considering to be true because that's how it has been

Now, note that some arguments can be refuted by finding not one, but multiple, fallacies. Consider the following argument, for example: "Our generation studied by rote and we did okay. Therefore, the next generation should also study in the same manner and they will be successful".

This has a hasty generalization (not everyone from the earlier generations studied by rote). It also has Appeal to Nature (what does it mean by "we did okay"? Simply because we exist in the current situation does not mean it is a success) or even an Appeal to Antiquity ("people should study this way because that's how they have been studying all these centuries"). It is also post Hoc ("studying by rote" does not cause "being successful"), a False Cause without considering that the social environment has changed. And, in the background, it also has a kind of a reverse tu quoque ("we suffered, so our next generation should suffer too").

More importantly, also note that the presence of fallacy does not mean that it cannot be persuasive, which is why it is exceedingly important to identify these fallacies. Some of these are fallacies of “authority” (Straw Man, Tu Quoque, ad Hominem, False Authority), while others are fallacies of logical “reasoning” (Hasty, Generalization, Slippery Slop, post Hoc, Red Herring, and Begging the Question), and some others are fallacies of “emotion” (Appeal to Tradition and Appeal to Numbers).

The presence of fallacy does not mean that it cannot be persuasive, which is why it is important to identify these fallacies.

The understanding of common fallacies and their refutation leads to better persuasion, better logical reasoning, and arguably better decision making. We will deal with how to overcome some common fallacies in a later article, but in most cases, it is about identifying and singling them out that does the trick.

Let me end this discussion on fallacies with sharing with you a bonus fallacy: the “Fallacy fallacy”, also called “ad Logicam”, which is a fallacy of assuming that something is wrong just because the argument used to prove it is wrong or has a fallacy. The premise(s) may not have enough grounds to reach the conclusion, but that does not make the conclusion false. A lot of good suggestions by employees get turned down in meeting rooms just because they are not backed by good argument, even if the suggestions in themselves are valuable.

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Have a wonderful day,

Shreekant

August 2024