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Appeal to Fear (Scare Tactics) |
| Description: | ||
| The argument attempts to persuade by invoking feelings of insecurity and fear. | ||
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| Comments: | ||
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| Appeal to Fear is sometimes confused with Appeal to Force. The distinction is this: Appeal to Fear is only a warning. The speaker is foretelling that something bad will happen to the listener, but is not threatening to be the cause of that harm. Appeal to Force is a threat. The speaker will personally do something to punish the listener. | ||
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| Examples: | ||
| "Goodyear. Because a lot is riding on your tires." | ||
| "Listerine: kills the germs that can cause bad breath." | ||
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| Discussion: | ||
| It is a good idea to be prepared. It is even a good idea to
be prepared for some things that are not very likely to happen (depending on
the severity of the consequences). There are mathematically precise formulas
for determining rational risks when playing games of chance. Believe it or
not, these same formulas (based on laws of probability) can be applied to
risks in daily life. Indeed, that is just how insurance companies operate.
How much should you spend to be prepared for a flood? How much for a fire?
The answer depends upon two factors: (1) what are the chances that the
disaster might occur, and (2) how much would you lose if it did?
Unfortunately, in most cases we can only estimate both probabilities and
costs, but this often doesn't matter. We can make instinctive guesses, and
our instincts are usually not far off base. Probabilities are not exact
numbers in any case. The object is to be close enough. The fallacy of Appeal to Fear imitates rational risk analysis, but exploits natural fear, and the inherent inaccuracy of guessing, to inflate our estimate of the costs and/or our estimate of the risks. By getting disasters to seem more likely to occur, or making them seem more devastating if they do occur, the fallacy tries to get us to spend more on preparing for a disaster than is genuinely rational. |
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| Classification: A Fallacy of Irrelevance (a deductive fallacy of soundness with a falsehood in the major premiss) in the Emotional Appeals family. | ||
| Source: I first became aware of this fallacy from Gerald Runkle, Good Thinking: An Introduction to Logic (1978). Although this is almost certainly not the earliest reference to this fallacy, I have not so far been able to identify an earlier source. Please contact me if you can point me to a potentially useful clue regarding the original source of this fallacy. | ||
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