As humans,
we undoubtedly put trust in people because we know them or know of them. ‘Three Men Make A Tiger’ is basically saying
that if we hear some sort of lie, or story, from multiple people we will began
to believe it just because more than one person has said it.
The story
of this fallacy comes from the Chinese King of Wei. The story goes, a man came to the King, frantically
needing to talk to him. The man goes on
to claim “there is a tiger in the market!”, the King shrugs this off because it
was so absurd, he then sends the man off.
Later, a second fellow comes running into speak to the King and says the
same thing, “Sir! There is a tiger roaming the market!” Once again, the King is
in disbelief and ignores the man’s cry for help because it is just too uncommon
for him to believe. Eventually, a third
man comes, he too says that there is a tiger in the Market. Suddenly, the King is baffled and in complete
awe because of this tiger he now believes is tormenting the market place. After believing these men, he soon learns
that there was in fact no tiger, but he believe it because multiple people came and
said the same thing to him.
This
seems to be a trend in our recent society, people will believe anything they
hear because multiple people either said it, or it was spread by an organization
for people to hear or see. The biggest example
and person that has suffered from this more recently is our President. All I hear is, Trump was quoted saying this racist
thing, and that homophobic thing; lies about what he said get spread like
wildfire because so many people do not believe in what he is doing for our
country. The first instance he has been
wrongly quoted was when people said “Trump said all Mexicans are rapists and
criminals”. This was a huge mix-up by
the Hispanic population, because it was so falsely spread. At the time, candidate Trump never once
uttered the phrase “all Mexicans are rapist and criminals”, but simply referred
to the crime rate of illegal aliens coming from the U.S – Mexico border, which
many of whom are of Mexican origin. I’m
sure some of you are thinking “how can you sit at your computer and defend
Trump?” Well, since I am majority Hispanic
with roughly a quarter white, it is easy to do a little fact checking when
something so absurd has been wrongly spread about me and ultimately my family’s
origin. I am not saying I do, or do not
support Trump, but I do support truth and far too often many sheep fall under
these false truths and will believe anything if they’ve heard multiple people
say it.
A
less taboo example of this happening could simply be in your friends
group. We all have made up some lie to
tell one of our friends to trick them into thinking something is real. You have a few friends sitting around and one
tells some lie and the other friends back them up suddenly creating this false
truth. That is the same thing as Three
Men Make a Tiger. That one friend heard
it from different people and suddenly it becomes more credible even though in
the end it seems to not true.
We are
all guilty of doing this at least once so far in our lives and sometimes it
may be unavoidable. But before you start
to believe such absurdities it wouldn’t hurt to check some facts and make sure
what you are defending or believing is indeed the truth.
http://www.breitbart.com/live/vice-presidential-debate-fact-check-livewire/fact-check-donald-trump-not-call-mexicans-rapists-criminals/
http://www.omsj.org/science/three-men-make-a-tiger
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