Large Fierce Mammal

Misleading Vividness is a fallacy in which a very small number of particularly dramatic events are taken to outweigh a significant amount of statistical evidence. This sort of “reasoning” has the following form:

1. Dramatic or vivid event X occurs (and is not in accord with the majority of the statistical evidence) .
2. Therefore events of type X are likely to occur.

This sort of “reasoning” is fallacious because the mere fact that an event is particularly vivid or dramatic does not make the event more likely to occur, especially in the face of significant statistical evidence.

People often accept this sort of “reasoning” because particularly vivid or dramatic cases tend to make a very strong impression on the human mind. For example, if a person survives a particularly awful plane crash, he might be inclined to believe that air travel is more dangerous than other forms of travel. After all, explosions and people dying around him will have a more significant impact on his mind than will the rather dull statistics that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than killed in a plane crash.

It should be kept in mind that taking into account the possibility of something dramatic or vivid occurring is not always fallacious. For example, a person might decide to never go sky diving because the effects of an accident can be very, very dramatic. If he knows that, statistically, the chances of the accident happening are very low but he considers even a small risk to be unacceptable, then he would not be making an error in reasoning. ~ The Nizkor Project

A few years ago, three motor vehicle accidents occurred involving cars parked in the customer parking lot of a shopping mall in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. They occurred within a period of a few months, and every one began the same way: a parked car with either an unapplied or malfunctioning parking brake somehow overcame its transmission and coasted down the sloping parking lot until it hit something. In two cases, the stopping influence was another parked car, in another, the rolling vehicle crashed through the front windows of the Zellers department store, ultimately stopping after colliding with store shelving. No one was seriously injured in any of these events, and although they occurred within a period of several months, they were unconnected and accidental, and there have been no incidents that were remotely similar at the location since then.

Nevertheless, a few weeks after the Zellers incident, I happened to be standing in a bank lineup behind two elderly women who were talking about it. One asked the other if she had heard about what happened and the reply was, “Yes! I don’t know if I’ll feel safe shopping at Zellers now!”

The first woman agreed with her.

Three cars parked on a slope jumped out of gear and coasted under the effects of gravity toward a shopping mall. Only one actually hit the building because the other two were stopped by other vehicles that happened to be in the way. The conclusion drawn from this by my commentators was that Zellers was now some sort of ground zero.

Two plus two equals five for very large values of two.

I mention this because the concept of misleading vividness came to my mind as I read reports of an incident that also happened in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia on this past Monday. Other than proving, yet again, the truth of an observation I once heard voiced by a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in reference to a mutual acquaintance he had recently arrested – “He’s an asshole, and if you’re an asshole long enough, eventually you’ll attract the police,” –  the incident has no other significance as part of a larger pattern, but that isn’t the way a public viewing the world through the lens of misleading vividness sees it.

To quote the South Shore News Now article on the matter –

Police confirmed Tuesday that they seized eight long guns late Monday after getting a search warrant for 201 York Street.

Chief John Collyer said one of those weapons was a .22-calibre assault rifle with an overcapacity magazine, laser sight and scope.

“It’s quite the weapon. It looks just like our AR-15 or our C8 [tactical weapon] that we have in our patrol cars,” he said.

Officers dismantled a marijuana grow in an outbuilding on the property. They also seized a quantity of cocaine.

Thirty-seven-year-old Sheldon Earl Bowers appeared in Bridgewater provincial court Tuesday afternoon facing seven charges.

Those include uttering a death threat, possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose, unsafely storing weapons, possession of marijuana for the purpose of trafficking, producing marijuana, and possession of cocaine and hashish.

Pursuant to the police response, two nearby schools were first locked down, and one (the Elementary School) was ultimately evacuated by school bus to another location from which students were retrieved by their parents. The heavy proliferation of cellular phones throughout a student population that had no idea of what was going on, coupled with instant (and for some, constant) access by students and parents to social networking websites, quickly spread a variety of versions of what was supposedly happening, none of them even close to accurate. For a time, the most common misinformation coming out of the schools was a rumour that someone in one of them had been stabbed, and this took on a life of its own in spite of corrections posted repeatedly by a person of our acquaintance stating that she, herself, was actually inside the lock down perimeter, and knew with certainty that nobody had been stabbed.

So instant and constant was the wave of misinformation pouring out of the schools that it left official announcements in the dust, and when they finally came, for a time actually drowned them out in the minds of frantic parents who had already decided they were facing another Newtown. For some, learning that firearms were seized in what turned out to be a drug bust only made it a Newtown “might have been” that would have been, if not for police action. The circumstances weren’t remotely similar, but regrettably and not surprisingly, simmering panic continues at some overworked computer keyboards.

I started this article with a definition of misleading vividness, and I’ll close it with the closely related “Texas sharpshooter fallacy”:

The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is an informal fallacy in which pieces of information that have no relationship to one another are called out for their similarities, and that similarity is used for claiming the existence of a pattern …. It is related to the clustering illusion, which refers to the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns in randomness where none actually exist.

The name comes from a joke about a Texan who fires some shots at the side of a barn, then paints a target centered on the biggest cluster of hits and claims to be a sharpshooter.