Hasty Generalization Fallacy

“After walking through this town for 10 minutes, I’ve seen several children and no adults. I guess all the residents are children!”

You make a hasty generalization when you jump to a conclusion from too little evidence—in other words, when you draw an inference from a sample that’s too small.

This fallacy can result in stereotypes. For example, after meeting two rude people from one country, someone might conclude that everyone from that country is rude.

It's worth noting that inductive reasoning—using many specific cases to form a general conclusion—isn’t a fallacy. It’s often how we learn from experience.

Imagine your friend undergoes a medical procedure and has no side effects. Concluding from that single case that the procedure causes no side effects would be a hasty generalization (and the anecdotal fallacy). But if a well-designed study followed a large, representative group and none experienced side effects, it would be reasonable to conclude the procedure is unlikely to cause side effects. With induction, we talk about probabilities, not certainties, and good induction relies on a large amount of representative examples.

Next fallacy (Guilt by Association)

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