Rhetorical Fallacy: Poisoning the Well
Definition: Poisoning the well is device used to discredit another's argument simply by giving unfavorable (and perhaps false) information about the person. This is in the attempts to leave the reader with a bitter taste in their mouth towards the person, biasing the way they read the statement.
I believe we use Poisoning the well a lot more often than we think. I'm sure most of us as concerned academic BYU students have heard of the website Ratemyprofessor.com. At the beginning of every semester when signing up for classes, we jump onto this website to know which professor would be the easiest/most entertaining professor to take a course from. Often times, professors are given reviews based on personal circumstances or perhaps another student's display of lazy habits coming back to haunt them when they see the grade they received. These opinions about the professors we take courses from taints our outlook we have towards how the class will turn out. In psychology we even discussed a study performed where they created two separate fake accounts for the same professor and either gave them really good or really bad reviews. By the end of the course, the class that received the good reviews for the professor had significantly better grades even though the teaching, assignments, and exams were exactly the same. Tainted opinions and biased views can truly affect how we look at things.
I like what you had to say about this. It is very interesting and we should all be more aware of it!
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