Misleading vividness

For thoughtful child sponsors

The logical fallacy of misleading vividness involves describing some occurrence in vivid detail, even if it is an exceptional occurrence, to convince someone that it is a problem. Though misleading vividness does nothing to support an argument logically, it can have a very strong psychological effect because of a cognitive heuristic called the availability heuristic.

Among poker players, the technique is known as "Hollywooding." A player was disqualified from the 5th World Series of Poker for peeking at another player's cards while attempting to mislead other players with vivid reactions to a supposedly poor hand of cards.

Examples:

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!"

Bill: "Police marksmen should use tasers instead of guns when it's safe to do so."''.

Anne:"Can you imagine what would happen if those darts from the taser went into your eyes, piercing your eyeballs, and then if they sent the high voltage through your eyes and brain! It would probably kill you and be much worse than being shot."

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.