7.3: Telling Only Half the Truth

Although some advertisements contain lies and exaggerations, the more sophisticated ones walk the narrow line between truth and falsehood. You get a little truth, but not enough. A sophisticated ad doesn't lie outright and say, "Our toothpaste is 25 percent more effective than all other brands." Instead, it says "Our toothpaste is 25 percent more effective." When we see this ad, we should ask ourselves: "More effective than what?" The advertiser counts on the fact that we will falsely believe it is more effective than all the competing toothpastes. Yet when the Federal Trade Commission demands to know what the company means by "more effective," the answer will perhaps be that it is 25 percent more effective than no brushing at all. When ads make comparisons, we readers need to be sensitive about what is being compared to what.

Besides watching out for comparisons, we should ask ourselves how the claimed effectiveness is measured and just who has determined that it is 25 percent. Are we supposed to take the advertisers' word for it, or can they instead cite a better authority? Suppose the ad had said, "Our toothpaste is 25 percent more effective, doctors say."

That is better, we might think. Doctors should know, right? But which doctors are doing the saying? Let's hope it is not witch doctors. Were the doctors offered money to agree to a company statement prepared in advance for them to sign? Unless we can rule out these possibilities, we should be cautious about believing that this toothpaste ad is giving us a good reason to buy a product.

Before you say that you know ads cannot be trusted and that you aren't fooled by ads that fail to give good reasons to buy a product, ask yourself why advertisers bother to spend millions of dollars each year using the same advertising techniques in ad after ad. Advertisers know that the techniques do work on almost all people. Do you have a non-brand-name toothpaste in your bathroom? Probably not. Must have been the effect of advertising.

"Lozengine fights bad breath," says an ad. So it does, but do not jump to the conclusion that it eliminates bad breath, or that it is more effective in fighting bad breath than Coke. In fact, Lozengine and Coke both "kill germs on contact." The ad has told you only part of the truth. That's not enough.

Using select information to sway someone's opinion is called the technique of selective representation. It is also called telling a half-truth. Logical reasoners should look for the full story, not just the select information in an ad. A logical reasoner's duty is to consider both sides, not merely the good side. It is the propagandist who pushes one side no matter what.

Newspapers often use the technique of selective representation. Here is a rather subtle example, a carefully selected headline that pushes a stereotype on the readers:

Former Mental Patients Suspected in 14 Killings in County

So, what’s wrong with this headline? In the middle of the article, the newspaper chose to emphasize this sentence: "At least five people with a history of mental illness have been accused of killing up to 14 people and injuring 12 in the County.” Without any other information, many readers will go on to the next page with the thought embedded in their minds that mental patients are especially violent. However, the logical reasoner will ask the crucial question, "Are the former mental patients killing more than their fair share?" That is, if former mental patients constitute one percent of the population, are they guilty of more than one percent of the murders? Neither the headline nor the article contains an answer to this crucial question, so the reasonable thing to do is to suspend judgment about whether mental patients are "getting out of hand." The conclusion we should draw here about logical reasoning is that when we need more information we should

The stereotype (general image) of the crazed mental patient lunging with a bloody knife is an inaccurate characterization of the class of mental patients. Even severely ill mental patients are no more violent than the general population. The following is a more humorous use of stereotypes:

Heaven is where the police are British, the chefs Italian, the mechanics German, the lovers French, and it's all organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the police are German, the chefs British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, and it's all organized by the Italians.

There is almost always a grain of truth behind stereotypes, the grain being that the stereotype does accurately describe some members of the social group, maybe many of them. The problem is that the stereotype too often does not accurately describe most members of that social group. Almost all of us carry a stereotypical idea around in our heads, and we need to be alert to the likelihood that it does not apply in the situation we happen to be thinking about at the moment. Many of us, when asked directly if some stereotype really applies to a social group, will consciously answer, “No, of course not,” but then we will continue to be unconsciously influenced by that same stereotype. That is the more insidious influence of stereotypes.

All of us have some degree of implicit bias which leads to our stereotyping others by the way they dress, their accent, their race, class, sex, and political persuasion. By becoming more aware of this, and by learning more about what disrespect looks like, we can become a fairer person.

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Which passage contains the stereotype? What is that stereotype?

a. The British government has long been aware that its strength has grown with industrial innovation.
b. The Chinese are from Asia; the Germans are not.
c. Most European medievals believed the heavens were full of goblins and spirits and unseeable occult forces, so when Newton showed how gravity could work instantaneously across empty space to keep the moon attached to the Earth and both of these attached to the Sun, he was sweeping ‘cobwebs’ off the sky.
d. To do mathematics you need paper, a pen, and a wastebasket; to do philosophy, the paper and pen are enough.

Answer

d. The stereotype is that philosophers are careless and publish their new ideas without doing any careful checking of those ideas. This remark is unfair as a description of most philosophers, but it does apply more to philosophers than to mathematicians, and that is the ‘grain of truth’ in the stereotype.

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Explain where the stereotype occurs in the following dialogue:

James: I’m glad you could come over for dinner this evening. We’ve been friends for so long, and we hadn’t met anybody in each other’s families.
Sheila: Yes, it was great. Your sister, well, we like each other, I think. Your grandmother was lucid.
James: Everybody is healthy. Aunt May liked your jokes.
Sheila: Great! You never know when a joke will make someone laugh and someone else be offended. I sort of beat up on lawyers, and, as it turned you’re your little sister is thinking of maybe being a lawyer someday. She wasn’t bothered, was she?
James: No, not at all. She might have said the same thing herself.

Answer

By saying the grandmother was lucid, Sheila thought she was giving the grandmother a complement, but it was a mild insult because of the stereotype that older people are not lucid but are losing it mentally. Would you like a friend to end a conversation with you by calling you “lucid”?

The hedge is another common but devious tactic used by the enemies of critical thinkers. It is based on selectively presenting information so that what the speaker appears to be saying can later be denied. An ad on a webpage might say, "You could make $100,000 this year if you …. " The word "could" is the hedge. Whether you could reasonably expect to make $100,000 is something else again. At first the ad appears to be saying you will make a $100,000, but on careful reading, you realize that the advertiser could claim, "Hey, we never actually promised a $100,000." Hedge words are also called weasel words. The phrases “up to,” “maybe” and “it is possible” can serve as weasel words. If I say my political opponent “might be” a liar, then I suggest the opponent is a liar without explicitly saying so. What a weasel I am. The critical thinker will always apply this principle:

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Identify the hedge in the following passage:

If you have ever participated in a public event of any sort and then watched the news report of it, you are already aware that the news report barely resembles what you experienced. You are aware of this because you were there. Other viewers are not aware. When television describes events that happened at some other historical time, no one can know what is true.

The best article I ever read on the inevitable distortions resulting from television's inherent need to condense time was written in TV Guide by Bill Davidson…. Writing about the new spurt of "docudramas," which represent themselves as true versions of historical events, he said, "Truth may be the first victim when television 'docudramas' rewrite history."

Answer

Reminder: Try to resist quickly looking down to the footnote for the answer to the Concept Check until after you’ve thought about the question. The hedge word is capitalized in the following sentence:

Advertisers too often use the technique of selectively emphasizing the trivial. Their goal is to take advantage of your ignorance about what is trivial. A Freedom shampoo advertisement might say that Freedom shampoo "adjusts precisely to your hair, taking away the oil and dirt just where it needs to." Great, but so does any shampoo. When it needs to, it cleans; when it doesn't need to, it doesn't. So what? If you didn't know this about shampoos, you might believe the ad is giving you a good reason to buy Freedom shampoo. The moral: advertisers love to make a big deal out of no big deal.

Product advertisers face the problem of promoting their product over that of the competition. Often, as is the case with shampoos, shaving cream, and toothpaste, there are many competing products but not much of a difference among them. So, the advertiser's goal is to create the illusion of important differences among brands when in fact the most significant difference for the consumer is price.

The logical reasoner’s best defense against the tactic of selective presentation of information is to become well informed. Well informed persons know what is trivial and what is not and know what is likely to be left out or covered up. All other things being equal, the more you know, the less apt you are to be convinced by bad reasoning.

Advertisers have more influence on the content of magazines and TV programs than most of us realize. In women's magazines, almost every issue contains ads that glamorize smoking. Ironically, these ads are sprinkled among articles about women's health and fitness. Yet the magazines rarely carry articles mentioning that cigarette smoking is a growing problem among women and that it is known to cause lung cancer, heart disease, and miscarriages. These deaths are preventable, and the U.S. government has been trying to publicize this fact. You'd expect women's magazines to take a leading role in alerting women. Yet an analysis of articles that appeared during a five-year period in the 1980s in Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Mademoiselle, McCall’s, Woman's Day, and Ms. magazines by a University of Oregon researcher, as reported in Journalism Quarterly, showed just the opposite. Not a single article, review, or editorial on any aspect of the dangers of smoking was published. The researcher found thirty-four articles about breast cancer, but none about lung cancer, yet smokers are twenty times more likely to get lung cancer than nonsmokers.¹ Cigarette makers normally cancel ads in magazines that do run articles on the health hazards of smoking, but the financial risks for the magazines are even greater. Tobacco companies have invested their profits by buying up other large corporations, such as Nabisco and General Foods. Thus, when the tobacco ads are withdrawn, so are many of the ads for the food products. It is understandable why magazine publishers don't want to offend tobacco advertisers.

This example of the high frequency of cigarette ads in women's magazines, coupled with the low frequency of articles attacking cigarettes, is meant to be suggestive. It does not make a definitive case for the influence of advertisers on magazines, newspapers, and TV programs. Maybe women's magazines don't run articles on lung cancer for the same reason they don't run articles on the dangers of fast driving; neither lung cancer nor fast driving is a danger specific to women. Breast cancer is specific to women; so perhaps that is why the women's magazines have articles on breast cancer but not lung cancer. However, cigarette smoking during pregnancy does cause low infant birth weights, which can be considered a problem of special interest to women, so it is odd that the women's magazines carry no articles about the dangers of smoking. Nevertheless, one research paper is not enough to make the case against women's magazines. To make a better case about the influence of advertisers, it would help to have testimonials from editors and publishers saying that they were in fact intimidated by the advertisers. Until you get that evidence, you should suspend belief about the influence of advertisers.

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Evaluate the reasons this ad gives for buying the product:

Recommended by doctors

Wackerli's Hair Spray

The choice of Hollywood's stars

The only hair spray with Formycin

Answer

The careless reader could leave this ad believing that the hair spray is somehow medically better, and that it is the hair spray used by most of the people in Hollywood who especially care about the beauty and health of their hair and who have made their decision on the basis of careful examination. However, the reader is reading all this in; the information is not really there in the ad. How many Hollywood stars actually chose Wackerli's hair spray out of the many who were sent free samples? On what basis did the stars choose the hair spray? The doctor part sounds good, but on careful reading we see that the ad does not say how many doctors recommended the hair spray or what kinds of doctors they are. Maybe Formycin is what we call “H20." Besides, Wackerli hair spray is probably the only hair spray containing Formycin simply because the Wackerli Company has a copyright on the name so that no other company is allowed to use it. It might be a fine hair spray, but this ad doesn’t give you any good reasons to believe it.

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¹ From the University of California, Berkeley Wellness Letter (The Newsletter of Nutrition, Fitness, and Stress Management), December 1990, p. 7.