Logical Fallacies
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50 free Logical Fallacies trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Bad arguments are everywhere: in adverts, comment threads, campaign speeches and family dinners. Logical fallacies are the recurring patterns behind them, the moves that sound persuasive while proving nothing, and once you can name a pattern it becomes much harder for anyone to slip it past you. This quiz works the way a critical thinking or composition class does. Many questions hand you a short everyday argument and ask you to diagnose what went wrong. Others cover the vocabulary students are tested on: the Latin labels and their plain-English meanings, the difference between a flaw of form and a flaw of content, and the mistakes people make with cause, chance and evidence. A few go behind the names, to the philosophers, writers and odd historical episodes that gave these errors their labels. The questions run from the fallacies everybody meets first to a handful of stretch items for debaters and philosophy students. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the quiz doubles as a study check before a rhetoric or logic test.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which error is expecting heads to be 'due' after a fair coin lands tails five times in a row?
Gambler's fallacy
Gambler's fallacy is also called the Monte Carlo fallacy, after a 1913 night when a roulette wheel there landed on black 26 times running. Bettors lost millions of francs backing red.
Q 02Mike Godwin's internet 'law' says long online arguments eventually bring a comparison to which figure?
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler comparisons were so common on Usenet newsgroups that Godwin coined his rule to make people think harder before trivialising the Holocaust. Logicians call the move reductio ad Hitlerum.
Q 03William Cobbett's tale of throwing hounds off a scent with a pungent lure popularised which fallacy's name?
Red herring
Red herring was the name of a strong-smelling smoked fish, which Cobbett claimed in 1807 he had dragged across a trail as a boy. In an argument it means an irrelevant point raised to divert attention.
Q 04Which fallacy turns 'we should trim military spending a little' into 'my opponent wants us defenceless'?
Straw man
Straw man arguments swap the real position for a weaker one that is easy to knock down. In Britain the tactic is also called an Aunt Sally, after a pub game in which players throw sticks at a skittle on a post.
Q 05Which object did Bertrand Russell imagine orbiting the Sun to show where the burden of proof lies?
A china teapot
A china teapot too small for any telescope to spot was Russell's example: nobody can disprove it, yet nobody is obliged to believe it. He placed its orbit between Earth and Mars.
Q 06Which fallacy claims that letting students retake one quiz will end with nobody ever studying again?
Slippery slope
Slippery slope arguments reject a small first step by insisting it must set off a chain reaction ending in disaster. The same move is known as the thin end of the wedge or the camel's nose in the tent.
Q 07Which fallacy answers a climate scientist's data by sneering about a messy divorce and unpaid parking fines?
Ad hominem
Ad hominem is short for a Latin phrase meaning 'argument directed at the person': the reply goes after the speaker's character and leaves the evidence untouched.
Q 08Which error concludes that quitting college breeds success because a few dropout billionaires are famous?
Survivorship bias
Survivorship bias means judging from the winners while the failures stay invisible. Statistician Abraham Wald met it in World War II when studying bomber damage: only planes that made it home could be examined.
Q 09Which error keeps someone watching a dreadful film to the end because the ticket is already paid for?
Sunk cost fallacy
Sunk cost fallacy is also known as the Concorde fallacy: Britain and France kept funding the supersonic jet long after it was clear there was no economic case for it.
Q 10The Flying Spaghetti Monster parody links global warming to the falling number of which group, mocking false causation?
Pirates
Pirates have dwindled since the 1800s while temperatures rose, so founder Bobby Henderson drew a joke graph 'proving' one caused the other. The gag shows why two trends that rise together prove nothing.
Q 11Which fallacy do critics see in the ultimatum 'you are either with us or against us'?
False dilemma
False dilemma arguments pretend only two choices exist when others, such as staying neutral, are open. The same flaw is also called a false dichotomy or a false binary.
Q 12Which fallacy is trusting a diet claim just because a famous actor with no medical training backs it?
Appeal to authority
Appeal to authority goes wrong when the 'expert' is speaking outside any field of expertise: fame in films says nothing about nutrition. Logicians label this version an argument from false authority.
Q 13Which fallacy is an advert's claim that a phone must be the best because ten million people bought it?
Bandwagon
Q 21Which fallacy defends an itchy school uniform simply because pupils have worn it for a hundred years?
Appeal to tradition
Appeal to tradition treats age as proof, and its Latin name is argumentum ad antiquitatem. Its mirror image, the appeal to novelty, claims an idea is better just because it is new.
Q 22Which fallacy claims a lake monster must exist because nobody has ever proved that it does not?
Appeal to ignorance
Appeal to ignorance treats a lack of disproof as proof. The same reasoning would 'prove' the monster is not there, since nobody has shown that it is: the evidence simply isn't in.
Q 23Which fallacy is 'a feather is light; whatever is light cannot be dark; so no feather is dark'?
Bandwagon appeals, in Latin argumentum ad populum, treat popularity as proof. Ten million buyers show what sells, which is a different thing from what is best.
Q 14Which Latin-named fallacy decides a rooster's crowing makes the sun rise because dawn always follows it?
Post hoc
Post hoc is short for post hoc ergo propter hoc, Latin for 'after this, therefore because of this'. Coming first is not the same as causing: the sun comes up whether or not the rooster does.
Q 15The 'hot hand' belief that one success makes the next likelier comes from which sport?
Basketball
Basketball shooters were the subject of the 1985 paper by Gilovich, Tversky and Vallone that first described the hot hand as a fallacy. A 2018 reanalysis of their data found real evidence of streak shooting after all.
Q 16Which Greek philosopher first systematised logical errors into a list, in a work called Sophistical Refutations?
Aristotle
Aristotle drew up the list to help debaters refute opponents, and compared tricky arguing to unfair fighting in athletic contests. His book set sound reasoning against what it called the art of sophistry.
Q 17Which fallacy is 'this newspaper always tells the truth, because it says so on its front page'?
Circular reasoning
Circular reasoning begins with what it is trying to end with, so the argument proves nothing new. Its Latin name, circulus in probando, means 'circle in proving'.
Q 18The fallacy tu quoque answers criticism by calling the critic a hypocrite; what does its Latin name mean?
You also
You also is the literal meaning of tu quoque, a move nicknamed the 'look who's talking' fallacy. A doctor who smokes can still be right that smoking is bad for you.
Q 19Which fallacy is deciding that a whole city is unfriendly after one rude taxi driver at the airport?
Hasty generalization
Hasty generalization builds a sweeping rule on one or very few cases, a textbook way of jumping to conclusions. A vivid personal story makes it worse; logicians call that version misleading vividness.
Q 20Which fallacy insists a herbal remedy must be safe because nothing in it was made in a laboratory?
Appeal to nature
Appeal to nature assumes that natural means good and synthetic means bad. The premise collapses quickly: many dangerous poisons are compounds found in the wild.
Equivocation
Equivocation, literally 'calling two different things by the same name', slides between two senses of one word: here 'light' first means not heavy, then not dark. Logicians call the result a fallacy of four terms.
Q 24Which fallacy is an advert citing two studies that favour a pill while ignoring twenty that found no effect?
Cherry picking
Cherry picking takes its name from the fruit harvest: someone shown only the ripest hand-selected fruit may wrongly assume the whole tree is that good. Logicians also call it the fallacy of incomplete evidence.
Q 25Which fallacy is demanding a transitional fossil, then demanding ten more as soon as the first is produced?
Moving the goalposts
Moving the goalposts borrows from sports such as football and hockey: the goal shifts mid-game so one side can never score. In rugby, deliberately shifting the posts counts as a professional foul.
Q 26Which term, tied to Soviet replies to Western criticism, means deflecting blame with a counter-accusation?
Whataboutism
Whataboutism earned its Cold War reputation when Soviet spokesmen met criticism of human rights abuses with charges against the West. A 1978 column in Australia's The Age applied the term to those tactics.
Q 27What is the literal meaning of non sequitur, the Latin label also given to jokes that come out of nowhere?
It does not follow
It does not follow is the translation, and in logic the phrase covers a conclusion with no real link to its premises. Comedians borrowed it for absurd lines unconnected to what came before.
Q 28In the story behind the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, what does the gunman do after firing at a barn wall?
Paints a target
Paints a target around the tightest cluster of bullet holes, then claims to be a crack shot. Researchers repeat the trick when they comb data for a pattern first and invent the hypothesis second.
Q 29Which fallacy concludes the sky must be green after one person calls it blue and another calls it yellow?
Middle ground
Middle ground reasoning assumes the truth always sits halfway between two claims. Logicians also call it the false compromise or the golden mean fallacy: when one side is simply right, splitting the difference is wrong.
Q 30Which fallacy rescues 'no vegan eats honey' by insisting that any honey-eating vegan was never a real vegan?
No true Scotsman
No true Scotsman comes from philosopher Antony Flew's example of a man who insists no Scotsman sugars his porridge and then, shown one who does, replies that no true Scotsman would.