Poking Holes in Your Logic: When Your Thinking Sounds Smart but Isn’t
NOTE: If you’d rather listen than read, get the audio here.
You know how you can’t unsee something once it’s pointed out to you?
That’s what it’s like for me when it comes to cognitive distortions.
Cognitive distortions are common glitches in our thinking. Irrational, biased, or otherwise illogical thought processes. Mental traps that we easily and naturally fall into.
Given the last twenty years I’ve spent knee-deep in psychology, I can’t help but notice them.
She always does that. Nope. Always is a red flag.
What if…? Nope. What if is a worry.
I’m just… Just making an excuse.
They’re everywhere.
This week, though, has been one after another, and the kicker is that they have sounded super logical. Distortions dressed up as critical thinking.
I realize that I can’t actually know what the people who said them were thinking or feeling in the moment (that’s called mind reading, another one of those pesky distortions), but I’d wager they felt pretty smug.
I get it.
There’s a satisfaction that comes from feeling like you nailed the argument.
Except that you didn’t.
Sometimes your jerk of a mind is being lazy, taking some shortcuts but packaging it up as something that sounds super smart… and leaving you with egg on your face if you really stop to think about it.
I don’t want that to be you, friend, so here are three telltale signs you need to be on the lookout for.
If/Then
If A is bigger than B and B is bigger than C, then A is bigger than C.
Score! Sound logic right there.
And if/then in other contexts sounds logical, too.
But that’s the case ONLY if the underlying assumptions upon which the conclusion is drawn are true!
I saw a Hinge profile (don’t even get me started on dating apps in middle age. That’s a whole other can of worms that I am wholly unprepared to open) this week that said: If you voted for Trump, then we have nothing in common.
I get what this guy was trying to say: politics are important to me, and I want to make sure we’re aligned. But his thinking is flawed.
By virtue of both being human, we do, in fact, have things in common. We both breathe. We eat. We are wired for connection.
By being Americans, we share other commonalities—yes, even if we live on opposite ends of the sociopolitical spectrum. (For the record, we don’t, but I’m making a point here.)
We have been programmed with certain attitudes: e.g., I am entitled to certain inalienable rights and that “football” involves helmets and 50-yard lines, not pitches and kits.
Now, to this fella and anyone who might be thinking something like “Dr. Ashley, I hate Trump so much that voting for him is unforgivable in my book.” Cool. You’re allowed to think that. I’m not trying to sway you in any way.
I am, however, encouraging you to look at the (il)logical leaps you’re making about what that one act means and being sure that you’re not climbing up on a moral high horse based on faulty conclusions drawn from mental shortcuts.
Take a breath. We’re all friends here, and we’re still on the same page.
I see this if/then logical fallacy play out in other ways all the time.
He knows I don’t like it when he does that. If he cared about me, then he wouldn’t do it.
False.
That statement is built on the erroneous assumption that caring = conformity. It doesn’t. People conform for all kinds of other reasons, like fear.
It also doesn’t take into account our inner workings.
We experience conflicting motivations all the time. You want to make your partner happy, but you also want to do what you want to do… or what your boss is asking you to do… or what feels easiest in the moment.
Moreover, this whole example really has nothing to do with logic anyway.
It’s about ascribing meaning to someone’s behaviors. It’s concluding that he doesn’t care about you because he knowingly did something that you don’t like.
(Honestly, it may not have been knowingly. We do so much on autopilot that he may not even have thought about you in that moment. Gasp! The horror. That’s just how our minds work.)
If she cared, then she wouldn’t just doesn’t hold water.
I saw a version of this playing out in the professional realm this week, too.
A fellow psychologist shared on LinkedIn a recent study that looked at the impact of texting an unknown peer versus an AI chatbot. The results found that the group who texted a real person felt less lonely, and the poster concluded that AI will never replace a human.
Then the comments rolled in.
Lots of voices agreeing. Lots dissenting. What was interesting to me, though, was the subtle if/then.
The study only ran for two weeks.
It seems like a leap to go from two weeks to never.
If humans were better than AI in this study, then AI will never replace humans.
Now, I’m not necessarily disagreeing with that sentiment. I happen to personally believe that there are fundamental human things that can’t be replicated, at least not by our current technologies.
But I’m humble enough to recognize that my belief isn’t the same as fact, and I’m cautioning us all to watch out for pseudo-logic when it shows up.
Question the underlying premise you’re basing your argument on, and make sure you’re not jumping to conclusions, missing essential information, or letting your preferences or beliefs skew things.
Either/Or
Similarly, either/or is often just another version of flawed logic. This is called black-or-white, all-or-none, or, if you’re feeling fancy, dichotomous thinking.
It’s our mind’s way of oversimplifying things.
Two choices are way easier to deal with than sifting through the complexities that are at play in many situations.
You’re either:
- with us or you hate democracy.
- pro-choice or you’re killing babies.
- a dog person or a cat person. (Nah. I am neither.)
When we boil things down to binary choices, it’s so often a false dichotomy. The reality is, we usually have more options than that or the issue is more nuanced than it’s being presented as. (Even right there, I’m sure there are many more possible explanations. I’m falling into either/or reasoning and feeling pretty good about it, as is the allure of false logic.)
My Experience Is Reflective of Everyone’s
Finally, we have overgeneralization.
I am a big proponent of trusting your direct experience over anything your mind says. In other words, lived experience holds more weight than predictions, assumptions, and expectations every time.
Just keep in mind that your lived experience may not be the same as mine.
A dear friend of mine is launching an awesome project into the world in a couple weeks. She was sharing her idea with another friend of hers who didn’t get it. That person has had a very different career trajectory from my friend, and the idea didn’t resonate with her, which is completely understandable.
Her response, however, wasn’t.
“No one’s going to know what that is.”
That was a secret and faulty if/then right there, my friends. If I’ve never experienced this, then no one else has, either.
Just because you have or haven’t known something to be true, doesn’t mean that’s the case for someone else.
While I firmly believe no one is really that special—there’s someone out there who has gone through, thought, felt, and/or done the exact same thing you have, I promise—I also readily recognize that my experience is vastly different from many others’.
Trust your experience, yes, but don’t assume it holds true for everyone else.
Stone Cold Logic, Please
To my surprise and dismay, I recently discovered that I am a Star Trek fan (at least the movies with Chris Pine as Captain Kirk, which I have been informed is near blasphemous. Apologies to you real Trekkies, and to the rest of you, please don’t judge me).
One of the core characters, Mr. Spock, is half Vulcan, a species known for suppressing their emotions and relying on stone cold logic.
Sometimes, I wish we could all take a page out of Spock’s book.
Yes, emotions are actually quite important, and no, we wouldn’t get very far in life without them. But how much different would things be if everyone operated from a truly rational, logical place?
We can get closer to that.
We just need to be on the lookout for the times when our sneaky little minds are tricking us into thinking we’re being logical when we’re really just being lazy with our thinking.
If we could all just keep these tricks in mind, then the world would be a better place.
(And if your bullshit meter didn’t go off with that last sentence, I need you to go back and reread this whole thing. You missed the point, dear friend. You missed. The point.)
“I find your arguments strewn with gaping defects in logic.”
Are you ready to live a bolder, happier life?
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