Red Herrings

A red herring is something irrelevant that’s introduced to distract from the actual argument.

The term comes from the old practice of using a strong-smelling, smoked herring to distract hunting dogs from a scent trail.

It’s also commonly used as a literary term, particularly in mystery novels, to describe something meant to distract the reader away from figuring out the real answer to a question (such as “who’s the murderer?”).

A red herring will often feel noticeable, because we tend to pick up on when a subject of conversation is being changed (Cegala et al., 1989; Graesser, Millis, & Zwaan, 1997; Schegloff, 2007). However, if the red herring is effectively appealing to our cognitive biases, we have a much harder time noticing it.

When you’re looking at any type of response to an issue or argument, ask yourself:

If it doesn’t — even if it feels good or you agree with the general idea — it’s a red herring.

Whataboutism

One of the most common types of red herrings is something usually referred to as “whataboutism.” Whataboutism is when someone deflects criticism or scrutiny by pointing to someone else’s wrongdoing.

Anyone who grew up with siblings probably encountered a form of this as a kid. Let’s say you and your brother are arguing and you end up calling him a jerk. In return, he gets angry and hits you. You tell your mom, who chastises your brother and tells him “Hitting is never okay!” But your brother responds by pointing to you and saying: “But what about her! She called me a jerk!”

Should you have called your brother a jerk? Probably not. But that doesn’t justify nor excuse his hitting you.

Let’s be clear: exploring the context of a situation, the potential hypocrisy of a person or group, or even related topics can have a lot of value. The problem comes when that’s used to distract from actually responding to the initial issue. If we don’t address one thing before moving on to another, we could easily get caught in a loop of diversions that doesn’t let us resolve anything. And addressing an issue usually isn’t difficult.

Let’s take the sibling example above. Imagine after your mother told your brother “Hitting is never okay!” he responded by saying “You’re right, I shouldn’t have hit my sister and it was wrong. I apologize. I’d like to talk about her calling me a jerk, though, as that hurt my feelings.”

This isn’t that much longer of a response, but probably strikes most of us as much more reasonable than “But what about…” — because it is! It’s actually addressing the issue before exploring something else.