How to Avoid Hasty Generalization

I had a conversation the other day with my friend, Hasty:

Me: “Canada has a good public health system: they provide care to 100% of their population.”

Hasty: “The Canadian healthcare system sucks! One of my friends from Canada goes to the United States for every medical procedure he needs; otherwise, he’d have to wait at a public hospital.”

This is an example of a logical fallacy called “Hasty Generalization.”

Hasty generalization happens when someone draws a conclusion based on a sample that is too small to support it. My friend Hasty took a sample of literally one person to counter my claim that Canada, home to 37 million people, has a good healthcare system.

What is Hasty Generalization?

Every generalization starts with an initial sample of things of a certain kind and then makes a claim about all things of that kind, for example:

All the ravens I’ve ever seen are black.

Therefore, all ravens are black.

A generalization is stronger or weaker depending on the size of the initial sample. Hasty generalizations are weak generalizations. A generalization is hasty when we endorse a general claim without having observed a sample large enough to be confident that the…