Hasty generalisation
This fallacy is often called the
converse accident because it is the opposite to the fallacy of accident above; that is, it involves moving too quickly from the specific to the general. For example:
Some murders are committed by men, so if we locked away all males there would be no more murders.
If we replace "murder" by any other social ill and "men" by a minority group, we can see that we have the kind of argument that has historically been used to justify organized or individual violence against them. The fallacy lies in making a general rule of a few particular cases, hence the hasty generalization. In this case, we need only find a single counter-example to show that the general claim is false, such as a murder by a female.
Another example could be as follows:
My friend lied to me, so it just goes to show that you can never trust anyone.
As before, the single specific instance of a friend lying has been used to justify a general rule that
all friends (or indeed anyone at all) are liars. One or more friends who are
not liars would serve as counter-examples to defeat the claim. To avoid the hasty generalization we have to be careful not to come up with a general rule from too few particular cases.
