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The logical fallacy of misleading vividness involves describing an occurrence in vivid detail, even if it is an exceptional occurrence, to convince someone that it is a problem. Although misleading vividness does little to support an argument logically, it can have a very strong psychological effect because of a cognitive heuristic called the availability heuristic.
Example 1:
- Anne: "I am giving up extreme sports now that I have children. I think I will take up golf."
- Bill: "I wouldn't do that. Do you remember Charles? He was playing golf when he got hit by a golf-cart. It broke his leg, and he fell over, giving himself a concussion. He was in hospital for a week and still walks with a limp. I would stick to paragliding!"
Example 2:
- Lois Griffin: "I found an ad for a used car from the paper."
- Peter Griffin: "Oh, no. A guy at work got a car from the paper, two years later, Bam! Herpes."
This fallacy is a kind of hasty generalization when an inductive generalization is a necessary premise and a single (albeit vivid) example is not sufficient to support such a generalization. See faulty generalization.
See also
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