Logical Fallacies Awareness
What Works to Build Mental Immunity - #9
Understanding how people often advance illogical arguments, and knowing how to spot such arguments, can help confer misinformation immunity. It’s crucial to learn how to identify fallacies and refrain from using them. Students should know to be on the lookout for the use of fallacies in the news media, and in their own work. Some of the most common logical fallacies include emotional appeal, ad hominem attacks, strawman argumentation, cherry-picking, and the tendency to confuse correlation with causation (a.k.a. post hoc ergo propter hoc).
Applications
Teach the most common logical fallacies alongside examples. Yourlogicalfallacyis.com1 and the Purdue OWL2 are both great sources of explanations & examples.
Train students to avoid using logical fallacies by calling out when they are used in essays, assignments, and discussions. When doing this, have the student reformulate their ideas so as to avoid using any fallacies they did. This might lead to them changing their mind about something and that is critical thinking in action!
Present real-world examples of fallacies: Use news articles, advertisements, or social media posts to demonstrate how fallacies are used in real-life situations. Encourage students to analyze and debunk them. Snopes3, RumorGuard4, and NewGuard’s Reality Check5 may be good sources for finding examples.
Notes
Logical fallacies can be tricky. Sometimes arguments combine multiple fallacies or have some valid reasoning alongside the fallacy. Identifying a fallacy doesn't automatically mean the whole argument is wrong. The key is to develop critical thinking skills to analyze arguments, spot weaknesses (including fallacies), and evaluate the evidence presented.
For all the modules in one place, visit our What Works to Build Mental Immunity Website page! See what’s to come and download PDF versions of these modules.
This post is part of our “What Works” series for educators and researchers.
We are open to incorporating feedback into these modules before we publish them on our website. Please comment on this post to provide suggestions. We’re particularly interested in additional applications, resources, and readings. All constructive feedback is welcomed. Thank you!
yourlogicalfallacyis.com, Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies
Purdue OWL, Logical Fallacies
Snopes, Fact Check Ratings
NewsGuard, Reality Check