I’m pulling on a your-chosen-boisterous-familiar-hat to provide an example of some everyday rhetoric:
Fuck there’s a lot of bullshit going around - and it’s so obvious!
Wolves and alpha-types - who believes this?
Dunning-Kruger - done on psychology undergrads - as if most under 20 year olds just starting university would not have at least some areas of overconfidence.
And how come people don’t know that you can tell a lie by whether the speaker is looking to the upper-right-corner - it’s where people look when they are visually constructing i.e. fabricating!
Your mileage may vary on how stereotypical this example is, but bear with me for a moment. These arguments implied that you and my boisterous alter-ego could at least agree on them based on a dash of deceitful rhetoric. Though these arguments are not entirely disagreeable, they’re vague and could be misleading. More importantly, none of them provided honest, open means of evaluation, instead falling back on fallacies.
Quick rhetoric refresher:
- An enthymeme is like a conversational shortcut that relies on shared assumptions leaving out information to implore: “We’re on the same page on this particular thing and we can skip to the next step”. It strategically leans on the listener to patch up the connections. Enthymemes are useful and underlie most arguments
- A fallacy is deceitfully convincing but logically unsound reasoning in an argument. It can be difficult to evaluate whether an argument is fallacious.
Some fallacies relate to enthymemes. A specific kind of fallacy often weaponised, for example, in politics and leadership is the failed enthymeme. An enthymeme is supposed to pivot on a common understanding, but a failed enthymeme skips that and poses as a enthymeme [1] to lead us to believe we agree on the connection. An example of a failed enthymeme could be how the efforts concerning weakening end-to-end encryption in the EU have been argumented: “to save the children” (original stance in 2023, updated take). Or in the framing of an enthymeme: “Can we at least agree that we don’t want to bring harm to children?”. What is missing, though, is whether end-to-end encryption actually is the culprit and whether the EU would be “throwing the child with the bath water” by hindering security across the line. A joint letter by several parties counterargumented:
In short, it will not solve the problem of the online spread of child sexual abuse material, but will introduce significant security risks for all citizens, companies, and governments. [2].
When decomposing the argument, the enthymeme is based on this syllogism:
- “We don’t want to harm children”
- “End-to-end encryption is the main issue (instead of helping)”
- “We should ban end-to-end encryption”
And it is a failed enthymeme, because point 2 does not hold. Failed enthymemes are quite prevalent – they often hide in those moments when your gut sais: “wait a moment, aren’t we leaving out some key connections here”.
Failed enthymemes underlie arguments about war, inequality, taxes, the size of government, the appropriate ways of raising children and the acceptable range of personal and sexual freedom. in all of those cases, if you look carefully, most of the arguments are going right past their intended receivers because what is being assumed to be agreed upon is not agreed upon. So the argument cannot ever move forward. [1]
The “save the children” argument might provoke a feeling that not everything is disclosed genuinely, which is a good indicator to start digging into details. An option had been to declare the whole ordeal nonsensical as it is built on a fallacy – which leads us into another kind of fallacy; Dismissing something just because it contains a fallacy is its own kind of fallacy: the fallacy fallacy.
Gut feeling is good, but so is fact checking from different perspectives. Also, I’ve found when I share a factoid with conviction, it reminds me to question if I’ve actually checked it (better late than never) – I’ve learned to be wrong quite a few times. Checking yourself should be seen as a journey and a discussion rather than a stance on status, authority or other redundant posturing. The SIFT method provides a four step procedure to “stop yourself before you wreck yourself”.
That’s basically my message for today: we should spot fallacies – and when we do – do our due diligence to stop misinformation, while minding not to fall into other issues in the process.
For the curious, though, I’ll follow with unpacking the boisterous intro about the wolves, the olde-DK and shifty eyes. In short, the arguments about alpha-types in wolfpacks and Dunning-Kruger being misrepresentative for humankind as a whole were on the right path. Still, the correlation between eye positioning and lying is very misleading.
The wolves and alpha-types - or specifically a type of alpha wolf rising in ranks due to aggressive and challenging behaviour - is a myth that started from specific research on wolves that happened in captivity and was taken out of context to relate to packs in the wild [3]. The original book was from David Mech in 1970 [3]. In the wild, those alphas are the parents and the dog-eat-dog battling is not prevalent. Then Frans de Waal popularised the “alpha-male” in his 1982 book Chimpanzee Politics. These authors have spent a great deal of time and effort to steer away from the myths and oversimplifications that portray wolves or chimpanzees having bullying-type alpha-males. Using the mythical alpha-male or “el jefe” stereotype to psychoanalyse human personalities thus might lead to a long list of argumentative fallacies.
Dunning-Kruger was initially done on psychology undergrads, true, but that is not its worst issue. It missed the mark on autocorrelation [4] i.e. reflecting correlation on the same measurements, specifically between the level of experience and, yes, level of experience. The error should be obvious, but it alluded seasoned professionals for decades and keeps doing rounds to this day. On that note, the majority of research in psychology is done on undergrad students [5] [6], which is problematic when the results are taken out of context as a blanket statements in the media.
The fixed correlation between eye positioning and modes of thinking has been debunked. Web-search is your friend. As far as I know, sudden shift in behaviour is the major channel of information that can lead to unravelling dishonesty, but it’s not straightforward. Then again, I’ve not read a single paper on tells or body language as it’s all been carried down to the public by authority figures (“worked in the special forces for 20 years”) and interviews that seem more anecdotal than anything. I should probably look into this.
The world is full of these, but there are means to check their validity. A few to start with if these were still not in your repertoire of “well-actually”: left brain/right brain, learning styles divided into visual, auditory and kinesthetic, humans using only 10% of their brains, sugar rush, Myers-Briggs 16 personality types and the derived “listener types” from those personality types.
- M. Drout, A way with words : writing, rhetoric, and the art of persuasion. Prince Frederick, Md. : Recorded Books, 2006. [Online]. Available: http://archive.org/details/waywithwordswrit0000drou [Accessed: Jul. 20, 2026].
- G. Team, GEC Steering Committee Statement on 9 September Text of the European CSA Regulation, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.globalencryption.org/2024/09/gec-steering-committee-statement-on-9-september-text-of-the-european-csa-regulation/ [Accessed: Jul. 22, 2026].
- S. Pappas,
Is the Alpha Wolf Idea a Myth?,
[Online]. Available: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-alpha-wolf-idea-a-myth/ [Accessed: Jul. 20, 2026]. - B. Fix, The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-autocorrelation/ [Accessed: Jul. 20, 2026].
Psychology Studies Biased toward Western Undergrads,
[Online]. Available: https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/psychology-studies-biased-toward-we-10-08-07/ [Accessed: Jun. 30, 2025].- J. Henrich, S. Heine, and A. Norenzayan,
The weirdest people in the world?,
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 33, no. 2-3, pp. 61–83, 2010. doi:10.1017/S0140525X0999152X