It may not come as a surprise to you that I used to be on a debating team.
It can be really easy to seek out information that confirms our own biases, but why is this and what does it mean for our fitness?
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
Have a fitness question? Email Kevin at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com or leave us a voicemail at (510) 353-3014.
Find Get-Fit Guy on Facebook and Twitter, or subscribe to the newsletter for more fitness tips.
Get-Fit Guy is a part of Quick and Dirty Tips.
Links:
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com
https://www.facebook.com/GetFitGuy
https://twitter.com/GetFitGuy
https://www.kevindon.com/
Welcome back to Get-Fit Guy, Kevin Don here. This week I want to take an overview of some of the common biases and fallacies around fitness. Once we can be objective and understand why we think and feel the way we do, we can make more informed choices.
It may not come as a surprise to you that I used to be on a debating team. One of the key factors in being successful in debating is the ability to recognize and argue against logical fallacies. A logical fallacy being a statement that appears true until one applies the rules of logic and reason. Logical fallacies abound in every walk of life, including health and wellness.
Let's have a look at some common logical fallacies and how they crop up:
The Strawman Fallacy: This is where, in a desperate attempt to defeat another person's position, one creates an entirely new position and instead argues against that new position. Instead of addressing your point, they set up a new (strawman) position, which can often look remarkably similar, often to make you look more extreme. Here’s an example from my own life: I had commented on a post by a well-known vegan organization that was really aggressive and derogatory towards meat eaters. My point to them was that front-on attacking someone else ideas isn't the best recipe for success. Instead of attacking those of us who do eat meat, they should create a compelling argument for not eating meat. But more than anything, they should recognize that in a society, there will always be people who do different things from us and that's ok. In response, one angry carrot chomper said “Right, we should just let people do what makes them happy, such as Jeffrey Dahmer and cannibalism.” This is a clear example of a strawman argument, because, of course, I was not advocating for making human burgers. This guy wanted to disorient me and make me say cannibalism is wrong and abhorrent, which it of course is, while my original point remained unaddressed.
The Bandwagon Fallacy: You probably know the popular idiom of “jumping on the bandwagon”—it’s pretty much one of the most common, if not the most common logical fallacy, especially in the age of social media and the availability of information, both correct and incorrect. The bandwagon fallacy is when we see people buying into something because a significant proportion of the population does. Unfortunately, popularity isn't a validation of an argument. It doesn't take into account whether or not the population making the argument is qualified to do so, or if evidence to the contrary exists. An example of this would be buying into an idea because your friends or colleagues do, your political party or other people who play your sport, or because a video on YouTube has been viewed one million times.
The Appeal to Authority Fallacy: This one is a little more tricky because citing an authority in a matter isn't always fallacious, but it does have the potential to lead us into dangerous territory because this is exactly why so many organizations pay celebrity endorsers and social media influencers. At a primal level, we are hard-wired for survival, and for humans, this means the safety in numbers of being in a tribe. Tribes have elders or chieftains. Therefore, we see people gravitate towards the recommendations of elders within the tribe one follows. In fitness, I see this often, where people are doing something because they saw that a world champion athlete does it. Having an authority back your position can be a great addition to an argument, but if it's the sole pillar on which the argument rests, then it's meaningless, I’m afraid.
The False Dilemma: Here we see a spectrum of reality being reduced to its most polarizing elements. The entirety of nuance along the spectrum is removed to be replaced with a “this or that” dilemma. This is a dangerous fallacy because it lends credence to extreme views and removes any notion of compromise or the fact that “it depends.” Take, for example, episode 617 where I discussed high bar vs low bar squats—this is a common false dilemma presented in strength training! We can see that there is actually a ton of nuance and it all must start with a question and not an answer, the question being “for what purpose?” Once you figure out the intention of training, you can find where you are on a spectrum of fitness needs and make sure you aren't falling into the trap of believing you have to be at one end of the spectrum or the other.
Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc: Excuse my Latin—“After this and because of this,” otherwise known as correlation and causation. Just because two (or more) things appear to be correlated, it doesn't necessarily mean that one did, in fact, cause the other. This can be difficult to overcome in practice, despite being easy to spot because of a person having “confirmation bias.” An example would be last week's episode (619) where a listener emailed in about not being able to squat because their knees are 50. In this situation, correlation is not causation, but confirmation bias that age is indeed the cause means that it's very unlikely that my episode changed this person's mind.
The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: Closely related to and often deeply intertwined with confirmation bias. The image here is of a Texan gunman who fires a whole clip at a barn door. He then paints a target around the tightest grouping of bullet holes and uses this as evidence of his expert marksmanship. We see this when people start with an idea and then cherry-pick data to prove their pre-determined conclusion. They ignore evidence that contradicts their intended result and correlate data sets without evidence for causation. In 2018, a well-known fitness education company asked me to help them find data to prove their point on a subject. This was already a dangerous position because they were looking for proof of a predetermined outcome, but when I actually produced evidence to the contrary, they dismissed it, published their findings anyway, and never spoke to me again.
Confirmation Bias: I’ve mentioned confirmation bias a few times already in this episode, but what does it mean? It is where, quite simply, we seek out and prefer information that supports our preexisting beliefs. It is actually a cognitive error, or an error in how we see the world. We all know that our eyes and ears are picking up millions of pieces of information, but our brain is subconsciously sorting this information out and only presenting us with the bits that it sees as critical to our continued survival. Think of your eyes seeing a shape in the shadows and making us jump. This is because seeing a threat to our mortality is an important survival mechanism. In modern society, we don't have the same threat level, but our brains are still screening and sorting information for us. This leads to us ignoring information we haven’t indicated as being important, as well as faster decision-making. These mental shortcuts are known as heuristics. We can see it manifested as
We are even more likely to have our decisions influenced by confirmation bias because of algorithms. Your search engines, your streaming platforms, and your social media all learn what your preferences are and then they recommend other pieces of data you may find interesting. It only does this based on what you show it you like or enjoy. So you only ever see things related to your own bias.
So how do we avoid confirmation bias? Well, first of all, don't freak out about it. Heuristics are part of who we are as organisms and mental shortcuts will always be formed. We can mitigate this by always researching thoroughly, by making sure we seek out all sides of an argument, and by only getting our information from credible sources. They have to pass the CRAAP test. And no, it's not what it sounds like, it's a useful acronym for finding information, created by California State University in 2004 for analyzing information.
That's it for this week, I hope that I have helped show that we are all affected by bias and fallacious thinking but that we can recognize and mitigate these biases and try to empower ourselves with the best, most relevant information. This will be incredibly helpful in fitness selection, but also in life as a whole!
If you have a question for me that you would like answered, please check out the Get-Fit Guy Facebook page, where you can leave me a comment or send me an email to