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The Appeal to the People Fallacy in Critical Thinking

The appeal to the people (argumentum ad populum) is an informal fallacy in which a claim's truth is inferred from the fact that many people believe it, even though popular belief does not logically establish truth. This concept belongs to informal logic / critical thinking, within the study of fallacious reasoning, and is distinguished from formal fallacies because the defect lies in the argument's content (the irrelevance or insufficiency of popularity as evidence) rather than its logical form.