We people always think that human is a creature of logic. But it is not the real situation. Human is a creature living, thinking and even analyzing emotionally. Never forget quote by Dale Carnegie. “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion”. On the other hand, this doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as human logic. It is always recommended that you should turn off emotions when you analyze. Only think you should use is your logic and analytics. And during analysis it is very easy to have some serious logical fallacies. Now we are gonna talk about few of them.

Texas Sharpshooter

There is very well known Texas sharpshooter. Whenever he shoots, he hits the mark. How he does it? He has a trick up in his sleeve. He always, shoots first, and only after he shots he draws the circle where he wanted to shoot. This sounds like a nonsense, but a lot of people do this nonsense. And when we say a lot of people, we mean almost every person be guilty of such fallacy. Starting with elementary school kid and ending with Nobel Award Winners.

Classical script of such fallacy in Marketing is like this. Researcher is tasked to do a Marketing Research. Lets imagine that this person is assigned to do the Market Research on what kind of clothing is being bought the most. This researcher loves to buy Casual T-shirts, thus he already thinks that such kind of clothing is the most popular one. Thus during his research he may find may statistics and graphs, but he already made up his mind on what kind of clothing is bought the most. Even though he may be wrong.

Never forget the right form of analysis, it goes like this. Some question has been asked. Research is being made. Analysis, graphs, research, surveys, etc. When answer has been found, researcher must make extra analysis, trying to prove this answer wrong. If he is not able to do it, then research has been finished.

Gambler Fallacy

We humans has a little thing that we like. And this is love to see the system, the law in something that can even be chain of accidents. This is not something bad, this is how we managed to create so many different science categories. Astronomy, Mathematics, Geography, Physics, Chemistry and many many different scientific disciplines have been created because we saw the system where other creatures did not.

But this thing, even though it has helped us through out our history, sometime can turn out to be a very Fatal Fallacy. This fallacy is called Gambler’s Fallacy, because gamblers make this error more than any one else, and they pay for this mistake more than most of the people. Such mistake occur when person. Who can be a gambler, businessmen, coach, or any human being who’s activity is connected to prognosis. After a few successful decisions, cannot analyze what was the specific factor that brought him this success. Thus, he just repeating things that had no connection to his success what so ever, or even unconsciously relays on accidents. Such ideas as lucky shirts, mascots, helping medallions, etc.

Accidents, coincidence and general luck can help you once or twice, but you should not relay on them. You must relay on your decision making, analysis skills, creativity and logic.

If you wish to read the second part, click here.