In this clip, John Oliver reveals how mainstream media morning shows make hasty generalizations based on preliminary studies. John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight deals with the issue of misreporting of preliminary scientific studies in the mainstream media. This misreporting is an example of the hasty generalization fallacy, as the preliminary nature of the studies is ignored, and the viewer justifiably might take the findings to be far stronger than they are. Oliver humorously shows the troubling consequences of this misreporting, as viewers are led to all sorts of mistaken (and often contradictory) conclusions.
One possible segment to play in class is 13:02-18:02.
The hasty generalization is a marginal advance on the anecdotal fallacy. Where the anecdotal fallacy has someone extrapolating a general rule from a single case, with the hasty generalization we are extrapolating a general rule from a small sample of cases. Generally, a hasty generalization is made when we have evidence that is interesting but requires further study to develop. Like the post hoc ergo propter hoc, it is easy to come up with obvious examples. I often appeal to racial stereotypes based on a handful of interactions as one example. Yet again, these sorts of examples are bad as they are so obvious, they don’t make the student wrestle with how they might be victim to it. Instead, it is just an obviously foolish thing to do.
A necessary part of being a critical thinker in contemporary American democracy is being an astute reader of the media. Unfortunately, the media has a bad habit of spreading false beliefs with a veneer of credibility. The viewer is enticed to mistake sleek production values and citations with quality control. The harms of this can be seen going back to the jingoistic reporting over the sinking of the USS Maine. The fact is, people mistakenly take the interests of media companies to be conveying information instead of bringing profit to their shareholders. At the end of the day, these are commercial entities that need to sell advertising time, and this provides real competitive pressure to exaggerate the importance of what they report on.
John offers an example of the hasty generalization fallacy when he discusses the treatment of medical studies by the media. Media sources have a habit of reporting on preliminary studies, which are studies by scientists with a small sample. These studies are never conclusive in themselves due to their small sample sizes but point towards the need for future studies. These future studies would then either confirm or refute the conclusions implied by the smaller preliminary study. Of course, this has the economic advantage that large studies aren’t being done on a whim. A study with 1,000 participants, say, could be far more expensive to organize, so a preliminary study is helpful in showing if we even need to do the larger studies in the first place.
The media, unfortunately, has a bad habit of reporting on these preliminary studies without explaining the context. Oliver shows footage of morning show hosts talking about the possible health impacts of chocolate and coffee implied by “science”.
Never once do these morning show hosts acknowledge that these studies are only preliminary.
To heighten not only the comedic effect but also the power of his critique, Oliver even shows the hosts citing studies that suggest opposed conclusions in different episodes (for example, one that suggests coffee reduces the risk of cancer one day and one that suggests it increases the risk of cancer on another day). Moreover, he also emphasizes the essential need for these studies to be replicated to mean anything. Unfortunately, as he states, the media is not interested in reporting any attempt to replicate the preliminary study especially if it finds nothing. The headline “chocolate does not either increase or decrease the risk of cancer” doesn’t grab much attention, so shows like Good Morning America would rather ignore it even if they earlier had cited a preliminary study that suggested the opposite (it’s also worth mentioning many of these preliminary studies are never researched further).
Here we see the media making a hasty generalization on behalf of the audience, and expecting the audience to just accept it. This is clearly done not for any particularly malicious motive, but just to gain an audience. As such, using this piece by Oliver allows them to recognize how and why the media is manipulative even when nobody in the media is consciously trying to be. In fact, the audience is never even sufficiently made aware of the hasty nature of the generalizations.
With this example, we’ve covered a fallacy that the students might be subjected to themselves thanks to the nature of their media environment. The irresponsibility of the media conceals the fallacious character of drawing conclusions from these studies. Being a critical consumer of the media is an essential part of being a critical thinker and a good citizen, and as much as anything else this example is just a fun way to discuss it with the class.
The Teaching and Learning Video Series is designed to share pedagogical approaches to using humorous video clips for teaching philosophy. Humor, when used appropriately, has empirically been shown to correlate with higher retention rates. If you are interested in contributing to this series, please email the Series Editor, William A. B. Parkhurst, at parkhurst1@usf.edu.
Sam Badger
Sam Badger is currently working on his PhD in philosophy at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He was born in London, England, and moved to California before getting his BA at University of California Santa Cruz and his MA at San Francisco State University.
