Pathetic fallacy

The pathetic fallacy is the logical fallacy of treating inanimate objects or conceptual entities such as countries or groups of people as if they have thoughts or feelings.

(Compare to reification.)

For example:

• "France wants to punish America!"
• "The Israeli people owe it to the Palestinian people"
• "Ah, it is no good. That car just doesn't want to start!"
• "the moving object, due to its mass, wants to keep going"

John Ruskin coined this phrase in his work "Modern Painters".

The pathetic fallacy with groups of people may overlap with the group attribution error: assuming most group behavior such as that of a disparate body such as a country is mostly situational, and it is difficult for such an entity to have any coherent disposition.

It is sometimes used in literary criticism, with reference to the above idea. For example, in a drama or novel, the weather might seem to be in tune with the characters' feelings. Other literary uses for pathetic fallacy would be having a certain character exclaim a fact or opinion which coincides in some way to that character, yet they are unaware of it.

See also: anthropic bias, Reification