Boscoe et al reported a socioeconomic component of cancer incidence. In Figure 2 of their article, they demonstrated a highly significant correlation between area poverty rate, race, and age-adjusted lung cancer incidence. However, they did not control for smoking because smoking data are not included in the central cancer registry data they used. We have examined age-adjusted lung cancer incid...

Philosophers of science have given up on the quest for a silver bullet to put an end to all pseudoscience, as such a neat formal criterion to separate good science from its contenders has proven elusive. In the literature on critical thinking and in some philosophical quarters, however, this search for silver bullets lives on in the taxonomies of fallacies. The attractive idea is to have a hand...

An open problem in the study of randomness perception is why, given the same sequence of independent and equiprobable events, sometimes people exhibit a positive recency effect (hot hand fallacy) and sometimes a negative recency effect (gambler's fallacy). In this paper we provide evidence of the role of causal belief about the source generating the sequence in predicting the next outcome. Peop...

This work is a revision of the False Dilemma Fallacy (FDF). The formalized model (FM)of this fallacy has as its centerpiece valid disjunctive syllogism, but premise presumed to be false, thus making argument unsound. Our revised (FM2.0) focuses on formal structure by comparing given vs. real argument, which unsound because invalidity. approach we believe more pedagogically useful and better exp...

AN IMPORTANT SOURCE of current misunderstanding and controversy about diet-disease relationships is the inappropriate extrapolation of evidence from group data to the individual and vice versa. In this editorial piece the difference is illustrated between correlations of risk factors and disease found in individuals and those found between populations. An attempt is made to clarify the causal i...

We review the literature on the hot hand fallacy by highlighting the positive and negative aspects of hot hand research over the past 20 years, and suggesting new avenues of research. Many researchers have focused on criticising Gilovich et al.’s claim that the hot hand fallacy exists in basketball and other sports, instead of exploring the general implications of the hot hand fallacy for human...

The inclusion fallacy is a phenomenon in which generalization from a specific premise category to a more general conclusion category is considered stronger than a generalization to a specific conclusion category nested within the more general set. Such inferences violate rational norms and are part of the reasoning fallacy literature that provides interesting tasks to explore cognitive and neur...

When making serial predictions in a binary decision task, there is a clear tendency to assume that after a series of the same external outcome (e.g., heads in a coin flip), the next outcome will be the opposing one (e.g., tails), even when the outcomes are independent of one another. This so-called "gambler's fallacy" has been replicated robustly. However, what drives gambler's fallacy behavior...