Monday, November 24, 2014

Logical Fallacies in DirecTV

A series of rather humorous DirecTV commercials intentionally use extensive logical fallacies to persuade the viewer into ridding themselves of cable and buying DirecTV. The commercials each follow the same general formula: someone who has cable is unsatisfied with some particular aspect of owning cable (such as price or speed). Because they are unsatisfied with owning cable, event X happens, and because event X happened, event Y happens, and so on. The events become less desirable with each one, until the conclusion, which is some strange occurrence that one would usually not associate with the ownership of cable. For instance, one commercial goes from the person in question "feeling powerless from paying too much for cable" to the same person falling into a dinner party. The exact sequence occurs as follows:

1. The person feels powerless from paying too much for cable.
2. Because the person feels powerless, they want to take the power back.
3. When the person wants to take the power back, they take karate.
4. When the person takes karate, they want to use their karate.
5. When the person wants to use their karate, they become the Fist of Goodness.
6. When the person becomes the Fist of Goodness, they run along rooftops.
7. When the person runs along rooftops, they fall into a dinner party.

The commercial uses the slippery slope fallacy to portray how cable frustrations can snowball into larger problems as well as post hoc, which assumes correlation and causation are the same (event X happened before event Y; therefore, Y was caused by X). The combination of the two leads to a fairly ludicrous (and hilarious, to be honest) commercial. I am not sure how effective these commercials would be at convincing their audience to switch to DirecTV, but they are sure fun to watch. 

1 comment:

  1. These are hilarious examples of slippery slope fallacies. Great explanation!

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