Mistakes

On page 67 of the Big Book, when we perform inventory, we are asked to identify our mistakes. This can include errors in the way we think and perceive. Set out below are useful lists to help in this regard: cognitive distortions, cognitive biases, and informal logical fallacies.

Cognitive distortions

Always being right	Starting from the premise that one is right then looking for evidence to justify it rather than examining the evidence to see if one is right.
Belief in fortune-telling	Believing one can read the future.
Belief in mind-reading	Believing one can intuit or work out what someone else is thinking.
Belief in signs	Belief that the universe provides signs to enable decision-making, e.g. seeing a poster for holidays in Thailand and believing this is a sign that God wants you to move to Thailand.
Catastrophising	Exaggerating risk or other negative circumstances.
Emotional reasoning	Assuming that emotions are a faithful guide to objective reality.
Fallacy of fairness	Reacting to unfairness (typically negative) as though an instance of unfairness breaks a cosmic rule.
False generalisation	Generalising based on insufficient evidence.
Filtering out counter-evidence	Filtering out any evidence opposing one’s view to leave only evidence in support of one’s view.
Filtering out the positive	Filtering out any positive events to leave only a negative evaluation.
Inappropriate blame	Holding others entirely responsible when one has had a part to play in a situation, either practically or in terms of one’s emotional reaction.
Mislabelling	Inferring the presence of a steady trait in someone’s character based on an individual action instead of evaluating the person as a whole.
Moralisation	Insisting on adherence to (often arbitrary) moral rules regardless of situational factors.
Personalisation	Believing one has a greater impact on others or is more of a causal factor in others’ behaviour or external events than is the case.
Splitting	All-or-nothing, black-or-white, always-or-never thinking.

Cognitive biases

Confirmation bias	The gathering or interpreting of evidence that supports a conclusion already drawn.
Fundamental attribution error	People over-emphasize personality-based explanations for others’ behaviour and under-emphasize the role and power of situational influences.

Informal fallacies

Ad hominem attack	Attacking the arguer rather than the argument.
Appeal to authority	Deeming a statement true because of the position or authority of the person asserting it.
Appeal to fear or pity	Trying to strengthen an argument by stimulating fear or pity.
Appeal to motive	Dismissing an idea by questioning the motives of its proposer.
Appeal to novelty	Advocating the superiority of an idea merely because it is new or modern.
Appeal to ridicule	Discrediting an opponent’s argument by distorting it to make it appear ridiculous.
Appeal to the stone	Dismissing a claim as absurd without demonstrating why (kicking a stone fails to disprove the assertion that there are no material objects, only minds and ideas in those minds).
Appeal to tradition	Advocating the superiority of an idea merely because it is old.
Argument from fallacy	The belief that because one argument for a conclusion is fallacious, the conclusion is necessarily false.
Argument from incredulity	Asserting that something cannot be true because it is unimaginable.
Argument from repetition	Simply repeating your assertion until people stop arguing with you.
Argument to moderation	Assuming that the compromise between two positions is either correct or more correct than the original two starting points.
Argumentum ad populum	Claiming a proposition is true because most people believe it to be true (regardless of whether or not they are qualified to draw a conclusion).
Begging the question	Including a conclusion in the premise. (‘Why do you hate me so much?’)
Ecological fallacy	Attributing a feature to individuals in a group based on aggregate statistics for the group.
Fallacy of composition	Believing that what is true of a part is true of the whole.
Fallacy of division	Believing that what is true of the whole is true of a part.
Fallacy of the single cause	Believing that there is only one, simple cause of an outcome that could be complex.
False attribution	Appealing to an irrelevant, unqualified, unidentified, biased, or fabricated source.
False authority	Using an expert of dubious credentials or an insufficient sample of sources.
False dichotomy	Two alternative statements are held to be the only possible ones, whereas there are actually more.
False equivalence	Arguing based on equivalence between two non-analogous situations.
Inflation of conflict	Dismissing the authority of a learned domain in general or on a specific matter because of relatively insignificant differences of opinion within that domain.
Nirvana fallacy	Rejecting a solution to a problem because it is not perfect.
No true Scotsman	Upholding a generalisation by excluding exceptions.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc	Believing that correlation entails causality.
Quoting out of context	Attributing a different meaning to a source than was intended at the time.
Slippery slope fallacy	Arguing incorrectly that one step down a path necessarily entails proceeding fully down a path.
Straw man fallacy	Arguing based on misrepresentation of the opponent’s position.
Survivorship bias	Excluding from the population of examination those who are invisible because they have left the process.
Thought-terminating cliché	Using a cliché to shut down substantive discussion.