Guilt by association is a cognitive bias where people draw conclusions based on unrelated traits of people, ideas, or things. It can be used in rhetoric to appeal to emotions and distract from the main topic. It can be helpful for quick judgments, but can also lead to logical traps. Honor by association is the opposite. Both are used in legal cases and everyday life.
Guilt by association is a form of associative fallacy in which someone draws conclusions with the use of assumptions based on the traits of people, ideas, and things that are actually unrelated. For example, one could say “humans walk on two legs, bears walk on two legs, so bears are human”. This extreme example of guilt by association demonstrates how this particular cognitive error works, but it’s usually much more subtle than that. The other type of associative fallacy is honor by association, in which someone makes assumptions about positive traits, such as “any of Jane’s friends is a friend of mine.”
Like other cognitive biases, guilt by association is designed to help people function in the world by enabling them to make quick judgments. Sometimes, this can be a good thing, as cognitive biases can allow people to interpret information quickly and sometimes surprisingly accurately. In other cases, cognitive biases hinder the effective evaluation of information and can lead people into logical traps.
People often use this fallacy in rhetoric, appeals to the emotions of readers and listeners. For example, a politician might say “my opponent was seen in the company of a radical activist, so my opponent is also a radical activist”. Emotion games often feature symbols that everyone is familiar with, such as Hitler as a symbol of evil in an argument like “Hitler supported euthanasia, therefore euthanasia must be evil.” People may also use honor by association in rhetoric.
In the heat of discussion, it’s sometimes hard to catch blame by association, especially when it’s well-distributed. People often use it in an attempt to get people to reject arguments, as in “someone you don’t like supports this argument, so the argument must be bad”, with honor by association being used to get people to believe an argument, as in “the political organization you support is behind this electoral initiative, so the initiative must be solid”. Often, guilt-by-association is used as a form of red herring, to distract someone from the real meat of the topic.
This concept emerges in a number of circumstances. In legal cases, for example, lawyers often try to rig the jury with guilt or honor by association, just as politicians get citizens to support or oppose lawsuits with wrong association. Many people find themselves using association fallacies on a regular basis, to do everything from getting a kid to eat their vegetables (“your favorite superhero eats carrots, so they must be cool”) to arguing with a friend about politics ( “Did you know that your candidate has accepted funding from that organization?”).
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