David Burns' Cognitive Errors and Fallacies
David Burns' list of ten types of cognitive errors is a valuable list of thinking errors that those with depression and anxiety disorders make. However, I find that exhortations not to make these errors are not enough. After all, sometimes in life there really are no pleasant options; sometimes labels are fairly accurate. How then do we tell when our thinking is in error?
We can do this by using the tools of logical reasoning and evaluation of facts that philosophers and scientists have been developing for centuries. I've noticed that Burns' errors of thinking correspond to fallacies often long known to our great thinkers. Below is a table listing Burns' thinking errors and giving corresponding fallacies. The lists of falllacies come from two sources. Those of Bruce Thompson come from his excellent Introduction to Fallacies website, which he created for some introductory philosophy courses at Cuyamaca College at El Cajon, California. Carl Sagan also presents a superb brief summary of such fallacies in the chapter "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection" in his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Both of them, of course, merely listed the ideas of others, going back to the founders of the modern scientific method, the philosophers of the European Middle Ages, and to the ancient Greek philosophers.
[Comments by me, Dennis, are in square brackets, like this.]
| David Burns' Error of Thinking |
Corresponding
|
Corresponding |
|---|---|---|
| 1. All-or-nothing thinking - You see things in black-or-white categories. If a situation falls short of perfect, you see it as a total failure. When a young woman on a diet ate a spoonful of ice cream, she told herself, "I've blown my diet completely." This thought upset her so much that she gobbled down an entire quart of ice cream. | Excluded Middle, or false dichotomy - considering only the two extremes in a continuum of intermediate possibilities (e.g., "Sure, take his side; my husband's perfect; I'm always wrong." Or: "Either you love your country or you hate it." Or: "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." | Black & White Thinking |
| 2. Overgeneralization - You see a single negative event, such as a romantic rejection or a career reversal, as a never-ending pattern of defeat by using words such as "always" or "never" when you think about it. A depressed salesman became terribly upset when he noticed bird dung on the window of his car. He told himself, "Just my luck! Birds are always crapping on my car!" | Observational Selection - also called the enumeration of favorable circumstances, or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses (e.g. A state boasts of the Presidents it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers.)
My [Sagan's] favorite example is this story, told about the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, newly arrived on American shores, enlisted in the Manhattan nuclear weapons Project, and brought face-to-face in the middle of World War II with U.S. flag officers: So-and-so is a great general, he was told. What is the definition of a great general? Fermi characteristically asked. I guess it's a general who's won many consecutive battles. How many? After some back and forth, they settled on five. What fraction of American generals are great? After some more back and forth, they settled on a few percent. But imagine, Fermi rejoined, that there is no such thing as a great general, that all armies are equally matched, and that winning battles is pureley a matter of chance. Then the chance of winning one battle of one out of two, or 1/2; two battles 1/4, three, 1/8, four 1/16, and five consecutive battles 1/32 -- which is about 3 percent. You would expect a few percent of American generals to win five consecutive battles --- purely by chance. Now, has any of them won ten consecutive battles...? [The current popular term for Observational Selection is cherrypicking the data.] Statistics of Small Numbers - a close relative of observational selection (e.g., "They say 1 out of every 5 people is Chinese. How is this possible? I know hundreds of people, and none of them is Chinese. Yours truly." Or: "I've thrown three sevens in a row. Tonight I can't lose.") Excluded Middle, or false dichotomy - considering only the two extremes in a continuum of intermediate possibilities (e.g., "Sure, take his side; my husband's perfect; I'm always wrong." Or: "Either you love your country or you hate it." Or: "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.") |
Tainted Data |
| 3. Mental Filter - You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively, so that your vision of reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors a beaker of water. Example: You receive many positive comments about your presentation to a group of associates at work, but one of them says something mildly critical. You obsess about his reaction for days and ignore all the positive feedback. | Observational Selection - also called the enumeration of favorable circumstances, or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses (e.g. A state boasts of the Presidents it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers.)
My [Sagan's] favorite example is this story, told about the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, newly arrived on American shores, enlisted in the Manhattan nuclear weapons Project, and brought face-to-face in the middle of World War II with U.S. flag officers: So-and-so is a great general, he was told. What is the definition of a great general? Fermi characteristically asked. I guess it's a general who's won many consecutive battles. How many? After some back and forth, they settled on five. What fraction of American generals are great? After some more back and forth, they settled on a few percent. But imagine, Fermi rejoined, that there is no such thing as a great general, that all armies are equally matched, and that winning battles is pureley a matter of chance. Then the chance of winning one battle of one out of two, or 1/2; two battles 1/4, three, 1/8, four 1/16, and five consecutive battles 1/32 -- which is about 3 percent. You would expect a few percent of American generals to win five consecutive battles --- purely by chance. Now, has any of them won ten consecutive battles...? [The current popular term for Observational Selection is cherrypicking the data.] Suppressed Evidence, or half-truths (e.g., An amazingly and widely quoted "prophecy" of the assassination attempt on President Reagan is shown on television; but - an important detail - was it shown before or after the event? Or: These government abuses demand revolution, even if you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Yes, but is this likely to be a revolution in which far more people are killed than under the previous regime? What does the experience of other revolutions suggest? Are all revolutions against oppresive regimes desirable and in the interests of the people? |
Tainted Data |
| 4. Discounting the positive - You reject positive experiences by insisting that they "don't count." If you do a good job, you may tell yourself that it wasn't good enough or that anyone could have done as well. Discounting the positives takes the joy out of life and makes you feel inadequate and unrewarded. | Observational Selection - also called the enumeration of favorable circumstances, or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses (e.g. A state boasts of the Presidents it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers.)
My [Sagan's] favorite example is this story, told about the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, newly arrived on American shores, enlisted in the Manhattan nuclear weapons Project, and brought face-to-face in the middle of World War II with U.S. flag officers: So-and-so is a great general, he was told. What is the definition of a great general? Fermi characteristically asked. I guess it's a general who's won many consecutive battles. How many? After some back and forth, they settled on five. What fraction of American generals are great? After some more back and forth, they settled on a few percent. But imagine, Fermi rejoined, that there is no such thing as a great general, that all armies are equally matched, and that winning battles is pureley a matter of chance. Then the chance of winning one battle of one out of two, or 1/2; two battles 1/4, three, 1/8, four 1/16, and five consecutive battles 1/32 -- which is about 3 percent. You would expect a few percent of American generals to win five consecutive battles --- purely by chance. Now, has any of them won ten consecutive battles...? [The current popular term for Observational Selection is cherrypicking the data.] Suppressed Evidence, or half-truths (e.g., An amazingly and widely quoted "prophecy" of the assassination attempt on President Reagan is shown on television; but - an important detail - was it shown before or after the event? Or: These government abuses demand revolution, even if you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Yes, but is this likely to be a revolution in which far more people are killed than under the previous regime? What does the experience of other revolutions suggest? Are all revolutions against oppresive regimes desirable and in the interests of the people? Inconsistency - (e.g., Prudently plan for the worst of which a potential military adversary is capable, but thriftily ignore scientific projections on environmental dangers because they're not "proved." Or: Attribute the declining life expectancy in the former Soviet Union to the failures of communism many years ago, but never attribute the high infant mortality rate in the United States (now highest of the major industrial nations) to the failures of capitalism. Or: Consider it reasonable for the Universe to continue to exist forever into the future, but judge absurd the possibility that it has infinite duration in the past.) |
Tainted Data |
| 5. Jumping to conclusions - You interpret things negatively when there are no facts to support your conclusion.
Mind Reading : Without checking it out, you arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you. Fortune-telling : You predict that things will turn out badly. Before a test you may tell yourself, "I'm really going to blow it. What if I flunk?" If you're depressed you may tell yourself, "I'll never get better." |
Begging the Question - also called assuming the answer (e.g., We must institute the death penalty to discourage violent crime. But does the violent crime rate in fact fall when the death penalty is imposed? Or: The stock market fell yesterday because of a technical adjustment and profit-taking by investors - but is there any independent evidence for the causal role of "adjustment" and profit-taking; have we learned anything at all from this purported explanation?) | Petitio Principii (Begging the Question). The words and phrases used to express the premisses are synonymous with the words and phrases used to express the conclusion. That is, the conclusion merely restates the premisses, with minor changes.
Examples: "No one is permitted to use the gymnasium on weekends, since people are permitted to use the gymnasium only on week days." "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaida is because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida." -- George W. Bush Discussion: Petitio Principii is undeniably a common fallacy. I often see it in student papers, for example. In student papers it often takes the form of an argument by double negation: "My position is not false, therefore it is true." One characteristic of the Petitio Principii fallacy is that it is more likely to fool the person offering the argument than the person he or she is trying to persuade. When one is already persuaded of the truth of a position, it is easy to mistake a re-statement or re-affirmation of that position as an argument for that position. Perhaps the single most important thing that students should learn from a philosophy class is the difference between holding or believing a position and being able to justify that position, i.e. the difference between the position itself and the arguments for that position. The Petitio Principii fallacy can easily fool people who do not yet understand this distinction. Classification: A deductive Fallacy of Circularity. Source: Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations 5 (167b: 1 - 15). |
| 6. Magnification - You exaggerate the importance of your problems andshortcomings, or you minimize the importance of your desirable qualities. This is also called the "binocular trick." | Observational Selection - also called the enumeration of favorable circumstances, or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses (e.g. A state boasts of the Presidents it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers.)
My [Sagan's] favorite example is this story, told about the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, newly arrived on American shores, enlisted in the Manhattan nuclear weapons Project, and brought face-to-face in the middle of World War II with U.S. flag officers: So-and-so is a great general, he was told. What is the definition of a great general? Fermi characteristically asked. I guess it's a general who's won many consecutive battles. How many? After some back and forth, they settled on five. What fraction of American generals are great? After some more back and forth, they settled on a few percent. But imagine, Fermi rejoined, that there is no such thing as a great general, that all armies are equally matched, and that winning battles is pureley a matter of chance. Then the chance of winning one battle of one out of two, or 1/2; two battles 1/4, three, 1/8, four 1/16, and five consecutive battles 1/32 -- which is about 3 percent. You would expect a few percent of American generals to win five consecutive battles --- purely by chance. Now, has any of them won ten consecutive battles...? [The current popular term for Observational Selection is cherrypicking the data.] |
Tainted Data |
| 7. Emotional Reasoning - You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel terrified about going on airplanes. It must be very dangerous to fly." Or, "I feel guilty. I must be a rotten person." Or, "I feel angry. This proves that I'm being treated unfairly." Or, "I feel so inferior. This means I'm a second rate person." Or, "I feel hopeless. I must really be hopeless." | Straw Man - caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack (e.g., Scientists suppose that living things simply fell together by chance - a formulation that willfully ignores the central Darwinian insight, that Nature ratchets up by saving what works and discarding what doesn't. Or - this is also a short-term/long-term fallacy - environmentalists care more for snail darters and spotted owls than they do for people.)
Appeal to Ignorance - the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g. There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist - and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy bazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we're still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. [The problem with trying to prove a negative is that one must exhaust the whole realm of possibilities, and it is rarely possible to do so. To disprove the negative proposition, "We have no evidence that there is not intelligent life like us elsewhere in the Universe," we would have to examine the whole rest of the Universe and find no examples of intelligent life like us -- obviously quite impossible at the current time!] Non Sequitur - Latin for "It doesn't follow" (e.g. Our nation will prevail because God is great. But nearly every nation pretends that this is true; the German formulation was "Gott mit uns [God with us]"). Often those falling into the non sequitur fallacy have simply failed to recognize alternative possibilities. Special Pleading - often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble (e.g., How can a merciful God condemn future generations to torment because, against orders, one woman induced one man to eat an apple? Special plead: you don't understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. Or: How can there be an equally godlike Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same Person? Special plead: You don't understand the Divine Mystery of the Trinity. Or: How could God permit the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - each in their own way enjoined to heroic measures of loving kindness and compassion - to have perpetrated so much cruelty for so long? Special plead: You don't understand Free Will again. And anyway, God moves in mysterious ways. [Special Pleading seems to involve saying that something is an exception to a general rule when it really isn't.] |
Straw Man |
| 8. "Should" statements - You tell yourself that things should be the way you hoped or expected them to be. After playing a difficult piece on the piano, a gifted pianist told herself, "I shouldn't have made so many mistakes." This made her feel so disgusted that she quit practicing for several days. "Musts," "oughts," and "have tos" are similar offenders.
"Should statements" that are directed against yourself lead to guilt and frustration. Should statements that are directed against other people or the world in general, lead to anger and frustration: "He shouldn't be so stubborn and argumentative!" Many people try to motivate themselves with shoulds and shouldn'ts, as if they were delinquents who had to be punished before they could be expected to do anything: "I shouldn't eat that doughnut." This usually doesn't work because all these shoulds and musts make you feel rebellious and you get the urge to do just the opposite. |
Observational Selection - also called the enumeration of favorable circumstances, or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses (e.g. A state boasts of the Presidents it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers.)
My [Sagan's] favorite example is this story, told about the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, newly arrived on American shores, enlisted in the Manhattan nuclear weapons Project, and brought face-to-face in the middle of World War II with U.S. flag officers: So-and-so is a great general, he was told. What is the definition of a great general? Fermi characteristically asked. I guess it's a general who's won many consecutive battles. How many? After some back and forth, they settled on five. What fraction of American generals are great? After some more back and forth, they settled on a few percent. But imagine, Fermi rejoined, that there is no such thing as a great general, that all armies are equally matched, and that winning battles is pureley a matter of chance. Then the chance of winning one battle of one out of two, or 1/2; two battles 1/4, three, 1/8, four 1/16, and five consecutive battles 1/32 -- which is about 3 percent. You would expect a few percent of American generals to win five consecutive battles --- purely by chance. Now, has any of them won ten consecutive battles...? [The current popular term for Observational Selection is cherrypicking the data.] Ad hominem - Latin for "against the man," attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously.) Suppressed Evidence, or half-truths (e.g., An amazingly and widely quoted "prophecy" of the assassination attempt on President Reagan is shown on television; but - an important detail - was it shown before or after the event? Or: These government abuses demand revolution, even if you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Yes, but is this likely to be a revolution in which far more people are killed than under the previous regime? What does the experience of other revolutions suggest? Are all revolutions against oppresive regimes desirable and in the interests of the people? |
Tainted Data |
| 9. Labeling - Labeling is an extreme form of all-or-nothing thinking. Instead of saying "I made a mistake," you attach a negative label to yourself: "I'm a loser." You might also label yourself "a fool" or "a failure" or "a jerk." Labeling is quite irrational because you are not the same as what you do. Human beings exist, but "fools", "losers"; and "jerks" do not. These labels are just useless abstractions that lead to anger, anxiety, frustration and low self-esteem.
You may also label others. When someone does something that rubs you the wrong way, you may tell yourself: "He's an S.O.B." Then you feel that the problem is with that person's "character" or "essence" instead of with their thinking or behavior. You see them as totally bad. This makes you feel hostile and hopeless about improving things and leaves very little room for constructive communication. |
Straw Man - caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack (e.g., Scientists suppose that living things simply fell together by chance - a formulation that willfully ignores the central Darwinian insight, that Nature ratchets up by saving what works and discarding what doesn't. Or - this is also a short-term/long-term fallacy - environmentalists care more for snail darters and spotted owls than they do for people.)
Ad hominem - Latin for "against the man," attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously.) |
Straw Man |
| 10. Personalization and Blame - Personalization comes when you hold yourself personally responsible for an event that isn't entirely under your control. When a woman received a note that her child was having difficulty in school, she told herself, "This shows what a bad mother I am," instead of trying to pinpoint the cause of the problem so that she could be helpful to her child. When another woman's husband beat her, she told herself, "If only I was better in bed, he wouldn't beat me." Personalization leads to guilt, shame and feelings of inadequacy.
Some people do the opposite. They blame other people or their circumstances for their problems, and they overlook ways they might be contributing to the problem: "The reason my marriage is so lousy is because my spouse is totally unreasonable." Blame usually doesn't work very well because other people will resent being scapegoated and they will just toss the blame right back in your lap. It's like the game of hot potato -- no one wants to get stuck with it. |
Post hoc ergo propter hoc - Latin for "It happened after, so it was caused by" (e.g., Jaime Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila: "I know of... a 26-year old who looks 60 because she takes (contraceptive) pills." Or: Before women got the vote, there were no nuclear weapons.)
Confusing correlation and causation (e.g., A survey shows that more college graduates are homosexual than those with lesser education; therefore education makes people gay. Or: Andean earthquakes are correlated with closest approaches of the planet Uranus; therefore - despite the absence of any such correlation for the nearere, more massive planet Jupiter - the latter causes the former.) Or: Children who watch violent TV programs tend to be more violent when they grow up. But did the TV cause the violence, or do violent children preferentially enjoy watching violent programs? Very likely both are true. Commercial defenders of TV violence argue that anyone can distinguish between television and reality. [But can children? Ask any parent! This sounds like Suppressed Evidence on the part of the commercial interests.] But Saturday morning children's programs now average 25 acts of violence per hour. [But where did Sagan get this number? And what are the acts of violence? Cartoon characters harmlessly hitting each other, or real humans slashing each other with blood and gore flying? This might possibly be Observational Selection on Sagan's part!] At the very least this desensitizes young children to aggression and random cruelty. And if impressionable adults can have false memories implanted in their brains, what are we implanting in our children's brains when we expose them to some 100,000 acts of violence before they graduate from elementary school? [Note that Sagan says that violent children's TV programs are very likely both cause and effect - but goes on to strongly imply that cause predominates. This sounds like Inconsistency! I've also noted the various other flaws in his reasoning. Although I'm sympathetic to his point of view, this shows how easy it is to make these mistakes!] |
Post hoc ergo propter hoc [After This (Event) therefore Because of This (Event)]
Non Causa Pro Causa [(Confusing something that is) Not the Cause For the Cause] |
Bibliography
- David Burns' Ten Types of Stinking Thinking from http://msmonarchdancer.googlepages.com/tentypesofstinkin'thinkin'bydavidburns and also http://www.psychcentral.com/lib/2006/the-top-10-types-of-stinkin-thinkin/ Both accessed on April 30, 2007.
- Fallacies by Carl Sagan from "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," pp. 212-216, in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. (Ballantine Books, New York, February 25, 1997.) ISBN 0-345-40946-1. Original hardcover: Random House; 1st ed., March 5, 1996.
- Fallacies by Bruce Thompson from (last revised April 18, 2007; accessed May 9, 2007) Introduction to Fallacies; http://www.cuyamaca.net/bruce.thompson/Fallacies/intro_fallacies.asp
Dennis
May 9, 2007, 11:46 PM