The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy

In this article, I will be talking about another widespread cognitive bias that can significantly hinder one’s judgement of a situation. The first article in the series can be found here (The Just World Hypothesis).

If you had ever had a debate with a person of opposite views, you might have been rather disappointed with the results: the other side simply does not perceive your arguments or reinterprets them so that they would support their point of view. This might seem infuriating, but this lack of understanding might simply be an occurrence of a cognitive bias – the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.

The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy (also known as the clustering illusion) is a logical fallacy that is based on humans’ tendency to find pattern in certain data while ignoring the dissimilarities and randomness. The phenomenon got its name from a cowboy shooting at a barn: he shoots at the barn continuously and then paints the bull’s eye on the area where there are most of the bullet holes. The anecdote is representative of the fallacy’s nature: the cowboy infuses some type of order in the randomness of bullet holes.

If a person has a tendency to fall victim of this cognitive bias when receiving information, they train of thought will usually follow this pattern:

• only find and study the information that will support and reinforce their viewpoint;

• interpret the facts in a way that would not contradict with their opinion;

• remember only useful facts while paying no attention to anything that contradicts their beliefs.

In this type of reasoning, emotions play a key role, as people usually fiercely defend their point of view when they have a personal emotional involvement in their argument.

The Texas Sharpshooter fallacy is caused by a human’s tendency to search for clusters of coincidence in a random set of points and attribute meaning to what they see. The rest of the facts and arguments then are ignored or dismissed. However, the humans’ propensity to recognize patterns has proven to be incredibly beneficial from an evolutionary perspective: thanks to this ability, cavemen could determine and remember what plants and animals can be eaten, as well as distinguish their tribe from another tribe. This ability also plays a key role in learning to read and talk.

The fallacy is regularly present in our lives and many examples of the bias can be found. For instance, even seeing a face or an object in the shape of clouds is one if the many manifestations of the cognitive bias. Another example of the fallacy is some undergraduate students dropping university after discovering a bunch of success stories of famous college dropouts. On this case, the students only perceive the information that they like hearing, while ignoring all the failed attempts to start a successful business of numerous other students. The fallacy also frequently occurs even in some scientific work, where a certain pattern can be found in an actually random set of data points, leading to the scholars drawing an inaccurate conclusion. For example, the existence of cancer clusters: while some studies indicate that there is a causal link between environmental causes such as air pollution and the rate of cancer cases in the area, the majority of studies do not find come to a similar result.

Although it is hard to resist the temptation of utilizing the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy as it requires a lot of additional and seemingly unnecessary effort, reducing this way of thinking in one’s reasoning is incredibly beneficial for their adequate and appropriate decision-making abilities. To achieve this, several changes could be implemented:

• Researching and finding information that is outside of one’s existing belief, analysing it and reforming the belief;

• Changing one’s worldview, if the new findings fundamentally contradict to what one believes in;

If you met a person who, in your opinion, falls victim to this fallacy in their reasoning, you could try using the following strategies:

• Try to get the interlocutor to fully describe their understanding of a certain situation, after that ask a series of leading questions to help the person notice the contradiction themselves and possibly change their point of view;

• Try to ask the other person to put themselves in the shoes of a person with an opposite viewpoint.

I hope this article will help you recognize fallacies either in your own thinking or that of others and hence become a more logical and unbiased debater!

References:

A Practical Guide to How Your Brain Works. https://grahamstoney.com/mindset/practical-guide-brain-works. Accessed 17 May 2023.

Cancer Clusters Fact Sheet - NCI. 9 May 2018, https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/substances/cancer-clusters-fact-sheet. nciglobal,ncienterprise.

Elsher, Paul. ‘Texas Sharpshooter (Logical Fallacy): Definition and Examples’. Fallacy In Logic, 28 Dec. 2019, https://fallacyinlogic.com/texas-sharpshooter-fallacy/.

Texas Sharpshooter - Definition & Examples | LF. https://www.logicalfallacies.org/texas-sharpshooter.html. Accessed 17 May 2023.

‘Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy’. Investopedia, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/texas-sharpshooter-fallacy.asp. Accessed 17 May 2023.

The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Have You Ever Had the Experience Of… | by Angi English | Homeland Security | Medium. https://medium.com/homeland-security/the-texas-sharpshooter-fallacy-8439e3e1173c. Accessed 17 May 2023.