© 2010, World Peace One          

Top of page 

Ways candidates try to fool voters

Ways politicians, businesses, political parties, political commentators, and even people who are working for positive change try to influence voters

Basics of media literacy

Ways people try to fool you with statistics    [This part is still being written.]

Common errors in thinking  (called "logical fallacies.)

Our vision for teaching this material:  It would be fun and educational to create videos that start out seeming to be a candidate debate. But the candidates are interrupted by a panel of judges with irritating buzzers, who stop them when they say something deceptive.  And on the podium there would be a scoreboard that would subtract points for each deception. In the first video, the panelists would explain the deception technique. In the second video, there would be a time delay to give the viewer time to name the deception, from a list of four possibilities. Then the correct answer would be flashed on the the screen. In a third video, there would just be a time delay, followed by the correct deception technique. Meanwhile, the candidates would become increasingly irritated and then hang-dog. Would you like to help with this project?  Contact us.

Ways Candidates Try to Fool Voters


Here are some "dirty tricks" that candidates and politicians use:

1.  Make promises without talking about how it will be done.  Talking a lot about vision.  (Where will the money come from? What are the specific steps (the plan) to reach the vision?)

2.  Emotionally presenting an issue. Often a politician creates a fear of some bad consequence is used to sway listeners.

3.  Only presenting part of an issue. Selectively picking the facts, or using distorted statistics.

4.  Unfair attacks of the opponent. They want emotional judgment without rational thought.  

5.  Making a surprising statement or creating a news event to shift attention from a more important issue.  

6.  Emphasizing one or two of their own big strengths, so as to get you to accept their weaknesses and less acceptable behaviors. (This is sometimes called the Halo Effect.)

7.  Give voters "gifts" to buy their support.  (The incumbent might engineer a tax cut or provide some new service to gain people's approval.)  

8.  Associate themselves with people who are liked and who have good reputations so that voters will like them.

9.  Distorting voting records:  Politicians can mask their intentions in two ways. They might oppose an issue, but vote for it when they know something attached to the bill will kill it. That way, it looks like they were in favor of the issue. Second, since many bills are voted on more than once, for instance for the appropriations, incumbents may vote for the bill and against the appropriation and use whichever vote will be more popular in their campaign ads. In a similar way, the challenger can distort voting records, by not explaining that the incumbent was right to vote against a piece of good legislation because of bad legislation that was attached to it, or because of some other problem, for instance, the goal was worthy, but the plan that was described in the bill was unlikely to work.

10.  Making rational arguments that don't really prove the conclusion. They prove something close to the conclusion, but not really the conclusion. Also, many politicians like to give the illusion that they are making a strong argument by using the language of reasoning, using words and phrases such as "my first reason..."  "My conclusion is..."  "It follows that..."

11.  Trying to create an image of themselves as being good, smart, confident, effective and so on. Politicians often want people to like and trust them, rather than understand their stance on the issues. So they act a part, and create an image with their looks, and with the language they use. Ultimately Americans should want politicians who make the best decisions about the issues. But many politicians want voters to ignore the issues and choose them for other reasons, such as seeming to be a person of strong values. Values are important, but the reality is that how politicians vote on issues is a more accurate gauge of their values, than how they dress or talk, or what they promise, or what movie star or athlete they get to endorse them...or whether 

Ways politicians, political parties, political commentators, and even people who are working for positive change try to influence voters


1.  Make strong and comprehensive arguments (a fair and legitimate way to influence.)

2.  Make one-sided arguments.

3.  Make weak arguments and use tricks to make them look strong.

4.  Use images, music and marketing techniques. All of the techniques that are used to sell shampoo or soda are used to sell candidates (except maybe "buy one and get one free.")

5.  Use psychological principles. For example: repeating something plausible, even if it's false, makes it more believable; sandwiching bad news between two pieces of good news. Or repeating a statement often, to make it seem more true, real or "solid."  Or saying something that produces strong emotions, to short-circuit critical thought.

6.  Change the subject. Create a news story that swamps the media channels with another message (that suppresses the important one.)

7.  Suppress information (buy off people, threaten people with job termination or threats, etc.)

8.  Create sham organizations to support or oppose an issue. For instance, there are several organizations that sound like they are for the protection of the environment, but are actually funded by groups interested in exploiting the environment.  

9.  Using dramatic stories, lofty language, or humor to entertain you, so that you like them or buy their product (which in the case of politicians is themselves.)




Basics of Media Literacy  

Media Literacy means that most messages in the media are carefully constructed, in order to gain power or profit. Someone who is media literate is skilled in "unpacking" or taking apart a message to take away its power to manipulate. Someone who is not media literate is often fooled or manipulated by messages from politicians or businesses.  Here are some basics:


1.  Media messages are carefully constructed. They may appear natural or may even actually be simple. For example, a video of a candidate using one camera, with no editing cuts, would appear raw or more natural. But, in this case, a decision was made not to do fancy editing--possibly to make the candidate appear more straightforward, open and honest.

2.  Sophisticated techniques are use to capture attention and create a mood. Whether it is a print ad, a news article, a radio ad or a video news segment, a variety of techniques were used. If you practice watching the form of the message, you'd notice that certain artistic styles were used with the music, the art, the layout, even the type of font.  

3.  More than one thing is being communicated at once. A candidate may be talking about issues, or a business may be presenting reasons to buy its product, but many things are being communicated. For instance, the candidate is trying to make a good impression, and make you distrust his/her opponents, and possibly get you to ignore certain issues when he or she talks about another issue.

4.  Messages are intended for one or more audiences. For instance, the same campaign ad may be trying to influence more than one age group of voters, and also avoid giving the candidate's opponents anything to attack.

5.  Different people "hear" different messages. Our values, culture and past experience affect how we interpret different media messages.

Asking yourself questions is the best way to "unpack" or defuse a message:

1.  Who made this message?

2.  What techniques were used (visual, sound) to make this message?

3.  What is the main message being sent?  What are "embedded" or more subtle messages?  What values, perspectives or assumptions are represented in the message?

4.  Is anything not being said? Is something left out or de-emphasized that one would expect?

5.  Who is this message intended for.  (There may be more than one target.)

6.  What would people who are different from me get from this message?

7.  Why was this message created?  (There can be more than one reason.)




Ways people try to fool you with statistics

Many people tend to think of statistics as the honest truth.  People will say, "The numbers don't lie."  Numbers, like science, seem to present objective truth.  The reality is that statistics can present the best understanding humanly possible, but statistics can be also be used incorrectly and also in a downright dishonest way.  Here are common ways that people use statistics improperly--whether the intended to deceive, or whether they were just unconsciously looking only for the statistics that helped prove their argument.

1.  Presenting the wrong kind of average.  

There are three kinds of averages:  the mean, the mode, and the median.  Each average tells us something different about a group.  Here is a group of annual incomes of people on Main Street of the fictional town of Riverdale:

$1,250,000
$150,000
$60,000
$50,000
$18,000
$15,000
$ 15,000  

The mean average is the total amount of income divided the number of people, in this case, seven people.  It's $222,571 a year.

The mode or modal income  is the most common income.  In this case it's $15,000 a year since two have that income, and there's only one person at any other income level.

The median income is the income of the person in the middle.  In this case it's $50,000 a year, since there are three people above and three people below.

So, if I tell you that the average income on Main St. is $222,000 a year, that paints quite a different picture than saying it's $50,000, or $15,000.  Yet all could be called the average income.  Therefore it's important to ask which average people are talking about!



2.  Using a biased or unrepresentative sample.  (Also, taking a small sample too seriously.)

Here are a few of the many possible sources of bias in polling:

a) Telling the pollster something so they're not embarrassed.  People will often pick some option rather than telling a pollster that they don't know enough about an issue to make an informed choice.  
L
b)  Creating survey questions with a built-in bias or survey questions that use emotionally loaded language.  For instance,  

c)  surveys that don't use a representative sample.  For instance, polls conducted on the internet would tend to exclude people who had low incomes and couldn't afford a connection, and also older citizens who did not want to purchase a computer or communicate via computer.  Or surveys that use phone numbers randomly from the phone book, still exclude a younger population that may use cell phones.

d)  survey questions that exclude realistic options.

e)  survey questions that exclude an expect range of options.   Here's an example survey result and then here's the survey question:   "Nine out of ten people were either concerned or very concerned about President Jones's stance on health care."    That sounds like many didn't like the president's stance.  But imagine that this was the survey question:

How do you feel about the president's stance on health care?  Check one:

__  Don't care about it.
__  Concerned
__  Very concerned.

Well, obviously most people would check one of the second two options.  What's missing are options such as "in favor of the president's stance" or "in total agreement with the president's stance."


Whenever you are presented with a survey result as part of a political argument, it's obviously intended as evidence to support a certain conclusion.  In almost all cases you need to ask questions or do research to find out what the statistics really mean.  They could mean one of four  things:  They will support the conclusion.  They will be meaningless or inconclusive.  They will support sometime related to the conclusion but not the conclusion. Or they will actually support the opposite of the conclusion once the distortions are removed.






3.  Not including the margin of error, or misunderstanding it.

4.  Using distorted graphs and charts.

5.  Confusing causality with mere order of appearance in time.  (Also, confusing causality with association or correlation.)

Here's an example:  From 1950 to now (2009) the world's population has increased from about 2.5 to 7 billion people.  The temperature of the oceans and atmosphere has also increased.  Since people burn a lot of fuel for heating and for transportation, it seems logical to assume that the cause of the global warming is human in origin, us.  But geologists tell us that even when humans weren't around, the earth warmed up as much or more.  So, just on the basis of the information provided here you cannot conclude that humans are the cause of global warming.  The situation is more complex.  

Here's another example: the dropout rate among girls in high school correlates with the number of teenage girls getting pregnant.  So one might use this statistic to encourage girls not to drop out.  But becoming pregnant might be the cause of many girls dropping out, not a result.  

Another kind of confusion involves a third variable.  Someone might present statistics on a rise in illegal drug use and a rise in crime in a certain city.  The implication is that the greater drug use causes the increase in crime.  That may be true, in whole or in part.  But the increases also might be caused by or better explained by an increase in the unemployment rate in that city, and/or an increase in population.  So, when being presented with statistics that imply a direct cause and effect relationship, you need to think about the overall picture and not make hasty or oversimplified deductions.

Here's another example:

The number of guns went up 50% in the last decade in Riverdale, population 50,000 and the number of deaths by shooting went up twofold  (100%).   But that could mean that at the start of the decade two people had guns, and now there are three who have guns.  It could also mean that one person was shot and killed each year, and this last year, two people were shot and killed.  So, if that's true, the statistic would probably cause many to believe  that 1) an increase in guns was a major cause of the increase in deaths, and 2) the increase in deaths was significant and something that requires attention.  

6.  Making unwarranted deductions and extrapolations.

Common Errors in Thinking    (fallacies of logic and rhetoric)

Tap dancing around an argument by making things up as you go along.

Example

Smith: God cures headaches when you pray.
Jones: I prayed, and God did not cure my headache.
Smith: God works in mysterious ways.

(Smith has ignored the counterexample and changed the subject.)

Drawing attention to the arguer rather than the argument.

Example  

"Candidate Jane Jones' proposal X is ridiculous. She was caught cheating on her taxes in 2003."

(The quality of her thinking on the proposal has nothing to do with something she did on her taxes, years ago.)

Arguing that something must be true (or false) simply because it hasn't been proven false (or true).

Example

Jones: I believe in God.
Smith: But you haven't proved He exists. Therefore, He doesn't.

(Absence of evidence does not prove something isn't true.)

Reaching the right conclusion by accident, or by the wrong means.

Example

Smith: I reduced 16/64 to 1/4 by canceling out the 6s.

(Right answer, wrong method.)

A implies B. B is true, therefore A is true.

Example

Smith: If God designed the universe, we would expect there to be orderly physical laws. There are orderly physical laws, so God must have designed the universe.

(Perhaps orderly physical laws are intrinsic to matter and energy.)

Unintelligible exposition due to poor grammar or syntax.

Example

Smith: To make a long story short on government spending, we have too many treasuries and people spend.

The use of personal experience as evidence.

Example

Jones: Polls show that 80% of African-Americans oppose gay marriage.
Smith: I know several African-Americans, and none of them oppose gay marriage.

(Smith's experience has no bearing on the fact stated by Jones.)

Leaving certain premises unstated for the purpose of eventual surprise.

Example

Smith: American Indians traditionally lived prosperous lives in relative peace.
Jones: Are you joking? They're the poorest of all demographics and suffered annihilation at the hands of European invaders.
Smith: I meant before Europeans arrived.

(No one can be expected to read Smith's mind.)

Also called false dilemma, or false dichotomy, this is the representation of something as having X possibilities when there are in fact more possibilities.

Example

Smith: Either Jesus was a liar or He was the Son of God.

(He could also have been delusional, or misquoted, or any number of other things.)

Circular argument.

Example

Smith: It's not necessary that God exists, therefore it's possible that He doesn't.

(Smith's conclusion is the same as his premise.)

The offering of only damning conclusions based on a biased presumption.

Example

Smith: So, Jones, have you stopped abusing your wife?

(Probably Jones has never abused his wife, and therefore has nothing to stop.)

Drawing conclusions about the whole based on conclusions about certain parts.

Example

Smith: Mercury and Venus have no moons; therefore, no planet should have any moons.

(Perhaps Mercury and Venus are not representative of the Solar System as a whole.)

Since X happened when Y happened, X and Y must be related.

Example

Smith: I was praying for a miracle when my toothache stopped. Therefore, God healed me.

(Maybe the toothache would have stopped anyway.)

A implies B. A is false, therefore B is false.

Example

Smith: If God would appear to me, I would believe in Him. But He has never appeared to me. Therefore, He must not exist.

(There could be any number of reasons God did not appear to Smith.)

A fallacy of induction, reasoning from the general to the particular.

Example

Jones: I'm a Christian.
Smith: Most Christians don't like atheists. Since you're a Christian and I'm an atheist, you must not like me.

(Jones may be an exception to the rule.)

The opposite of a composition fallacy — i.e., drawing conclusions about parts based on the whole.]

Example

Smith: That mountain looks purple, so it must have purple trees.

(The color of the mountain from a distance is influenced by atmospheric conditions.)

Using a word or phrase to mean different things in different contexts.

Example

Smith: Since America is the land of the free, we should all get free beer.

("Free" means two different things in those contexts.)

Appeal to things that are irrelevant to the argument. There are a whole slew of these, from appeal to authority to appeal to pity. These are not always necessarily logical fallacies, but are when they do not bear upon the argument.

Example

Jones: Most climatologists say that global warming is real.
Smith: Yeah, but most Americans say that it isn't.

(Jones' appeal to authority is reasonable, since climatologists are experts on weather. But Smith's appeal is irrelevant.)

The notion that a thing is due to happen because of the law of averages.

Example

Smith: I haven't gotten heads for the last twenty tosses. I'm bound to get heads on this toss!

(The odds of getting heads are still fifty-fifty.)

The notion that an argument is corrupt (or valid) because something about its source is corrupt (or valid).

Examples

• "You're not going to wear a wedding ring, are you? Don't you know that the wedding ring originally symbolized ankle chains worn by women to prevent them from running away from their husbands? I would not have thought you would be a party to such a sexist practice."

These alleged sexist origins do not make anyone who wears a wedding ring sexist.

• Isaac Newton was led to his theory of gravity by his interest in the occult, specifically the concept of "action at a distance," therefore anyone who believes in gravity is a follower of the occult.

Gravity is nonetheless not an occult doctrine and it has since been scientifically measured.

Arguing that since neither extreme is good, something in the middle must be good.

Example

Smith: The left exercises financial tyranny, and the right exercises moral tyranny. Therefore, the correct position is held by the centrist.

(A blending of tyrannies is hardly an improvement.)

Drawing a conclusion based on a sample that is too small or limited.

Example

Smith: These two songs by Elton John are awful.. Therefore, he must be a lousy composer.

(Perhaps most of Elton John's songs are not awful.)

Treating an abstract entity as though it were real.

Example

Jones: Natural selection is one mechanism by which species evolve.
Smith: The fact that species need a guiding hand is evidence of an intelligent creator.

(Natural selection is not a guiding hand. It has no purpose or intent.)

Naturalistic Fallacy

Arguing that a fact leads to a conclusion about a value. This fallacy is insidious because it is cloaked in legitimacy.

Example

Smith: 80% of the prison population is composed of minorities. Therefore, we should not trust anyone who isn't white.

(People may be imprisoned for any number of reasons, from being too poor to afford good lawyers to being railroaded as political threats. Trustworthiness is not an attribute of political clout.)

Disqualifying a sample based on arbitrary prejudice. Be careful to distinguish this from a reasonable prejudice.

Example

Smith: Those war protestors ought to be deported.
Jones: But they are American citizens.
Smith: No true American would protest during a time of war.

A conclusion that does not follow from its argument.

Example

Smith: John is a hard worker, so we should hire his son.

(Just because John works hard does not mean that his son does as well.)

Also known as begging the question. One or more of an argument's premises is found in its conclusion.

Example

"The Bible says God exists, and the Bible must be right since it is the revealed word of God, so God exists."

In other words, the conclusion is "God exists."  But one of the premises assumes that God exists. God (who must exist to do anything) created the Bible.

Attempting to invalidate an argument by pointing out a flaw in something only tangentially related to the argument.

Example

Smith: If you need to be convinced that Christianity is corrupt, just look at Hitler. He was a Christian.

(Even if Hitler was a Christian, he was not a church leader and therefore is not even relevant to the point.)

The notion that because B followed A, A must have been the cause of B.

Example

Smith: This forum went downhill right after the downloads were taken away.

(It is possible that it would have gone downhill anyway, or for some other reason.)

The introduction of a distraction for the purpose of derailing an argument.

Example

Jones: Tides are caused by the moon's gravity.
Smith: But what about the moon landings? Do you deny that they were a hoax?

(Smith has effectively changed the subject.)

The burden of proof is always on the person making the assertion.

Example

Smith: Pi must have a repeated pattern somewhere in all that mess of numbers.
Jones: Prove it.
Smith: Prove that it doesn't.

(Smith made the initial assertion. The burden of proof is on him.)

Not always bogus, but when used recklessly this fallacy is similar to the gambler's fallacy.

Example

Smith: Use of marijuana leads to use of harder drugs, which often leads to burglary and robbery and violent crimes in an attempt to pay for the drugs. Therefore, marijuana should not be legalized.
.
(Marijuana's legalization should be debated based on the plant's own properties and effects, not based on associations with events of undetermined probability.)

A violation of the philosophical principle of Relevant Difference, i.e., making the case that something should be an exception to the rule without any just cause.

Example

Jones: We can't hire you because you don't meet our standards.
Smith: But I had an unhappy childhood. Shouldn't you make an exception for me?

(No.)

Formulating an argument (B) that differs from the argument (A) presented by one's opponent in order to argue against B instead of A.

Example

Jones: Abortion is a matter of a woman's privacy rights.
Smith: So, you're saying that women should be allowed to commit murder?

(No, Jones is saying no such thing.)

A fallacy of deduction that posits an unprovable counter-example.

Example

Smith: I know that astral travel works because I've done it.
Jones: Well, I've tried it, and I can't do it.
Smith: You just don't have the necessary psychic power.

Too complex to cover here comprehensively, refer to this resource.

Example

Smith: All insects die. Socrates is dead. Therefore, Socrates was an insect.

(But other things die too.)

Literally means "you too". This is a special case ad hominem holding that one's own bad reasoning or behavior is justified by another's.

Example

Smith: I realize I've been rude, but you were rude too.

(Two wrongs don't make a right.)

Arguing that some particular commonality implies a broader commonality.

Example

Smith: Since dogs are carbon based life forms and so are cats, it follows that dogs are a form of cat.

(But there are lots of carbon based life forms.)




When ready, please continue on to Analyzing Issues.