False Cause Fallacy

By Yiler Huang

False Cause fallacies describe the situation when people think one thing causes another thing to happen, but in reality they just happened at the same time. One very common example is the “Mercury Retrograde” (the phenomenon where the planet Mercury appears to be orbiting backwards). Many people believe that bad things will happen to them when this phenomenon occurs. However, Mercury actually spends more than 2 months going backwards every year, which means the occurrence of bad things and this phenomenon can very possibly be happening simultaneously and have no relationships with each other.

Another example is from my parents. When I was young, I realized that I have eye floaters. I told my parents and they thought it was because I looked at screens too much. But in reality, I’ve had this problem far before I started using screens. Many superstitions are also based on this fallacy. If you are Taiwanese, it is likely that you’ve heard people telling you not to stick your chopsticks in your rice. Things most likely because that is what we do when people die. However, the fallacy here is that sticking your chopsticks on your rice doesn’t make people die, it’s just because these two things happen at the same time in some traditional cultures.

This fallacy can also be used to manipulate people. If something good happened to a person, you can convince them that it’s something they did the previous day that made this happen. From now on they would be gaslighted, thinking that doing a certain thing can bring them good luck.