A field guide to the ways reasoning breaks
Crowds and prestige
Also called Argument from repetition
Treating repetition as if it were support, so a claim gains credibility by being said often.
It has been said so often it must be true.
Count the arguments, not the mentions. Ask what new evidence each repetition added.
Latin for 'argument to the point of nausea' — the claim is pushed until listeners are too tired of it to push back. Psychologists gave the underlying effect a name in 1977, when Hasher, Goldstein, and Toppino showed that repeated statements are rated truer purely because they were repeated.
A headline claims the economy is collapsing; the same claim, reworded, fills half your feed for a week, and by Friday it feels like common knowledge.
In every sprint retro the same engineer repeats that the codebase is unsalvageable, and over months the team starts treating a rewrite as settled without ever reading an audit.
An ad runs the same 'nine out of ten' line for years, and people eventually quote it as a statistic without ever asking nine out of ten whom.
A family elder says at every gathering that the eldest grandchild is the difficult one, and the cousins begin introductions with apologies for her before she speaks.