Logical Fallacies

David McRaney explains our identity, “You are a confabulatory creature by nature. You are always explaining to yourself the motivations for your actions and the causes to the effects in your life, and you make them up without realizing it when you don 't know the answers. Over time, these explanations become your idea of who you are and your place in the world. They are your self... You are a story you tell yourself (McRaney).” Often, people struggle understanding certain things about themselves. We think, act and study a certain way through how we perceived things growing up, how we were taught and how we were influenced. Heuristics, logical fallacies, the 3rd person effect, confirmation bias and priming can have a negative impact on a students

They are like math problems involving language, in which you skip a step or get turned around without realizing (McRaney). It’s an argument in the mind where a conclusion is reached because one doesn’t desire to acknowledge the facts. It makes it difficult to obtain and acknowledge new information to learn within an educational environment. This can hinder the ability to achieve success when logical fallacies take place as a role in a student’s mind. This type of mindset is often used when a person is losing a debate and deceptive techniques are used in their words to try and persuade ones opinion. McRaney’s provides an example on what leads and develops from the use of logical fallacies, “When you get into an argument about either something personal or something more public and abstract, you sometimes resort to constructing a character who you find easier to refute, argue, and disagree with, or you create a position the other person isn’t even suggesting or defending”(McRaney). The person in that case has created what is known as the straw man fallacy. This happens so often that scientists are trained to notice when this fallacy is being used in an argument with themselves and opponents when asserting their opinions or shooting down the claims of others (McRaney). Thus, has created an artificial argument that the debater feels more comfortable dealing

How many people share our same view about things? Is the media affecting our perception of reality? These questions circulated my thoughts after reading Chapter 30, which introduced the 3rd person affect. McRaney suggests, “A great many messages among the countless ones bombarding you every day are considered dangerous because they might sway other people or fester in their minds until they act out on the suggestions coming out of all manner of sources, from violent video games to late-night pundit programming. For every outlet of information, there are some who see it as dangerous not because it affects them, but because it might affect the thoughts and opinions of an imaginary third party”(McRaney). The media can have both, a positive and negative impact on how it’s affecting and influencing society. Many people don’t acknowledge how they are being affected, but how others are. The mistake to view this issue in that perspective is inaccurate because it’s affecting us all. Specifically, the groups where they don’t share the same beliefs and ideas are the ones who we think are being influenced and bowled over by the messages through media and the world.

Entering a mindset of priming, the person is unaware of their instinctive reactions to what is the current epidemic that’s being dealt. How this influences the way we behave and think is by routine and impulse. Priming can be very salient and long lasting, which