# The "everyone does it" logic **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 22, 2015, 7:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-everyone-does-it-logic/738298 "2015-11-22T19:11:24Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![kayaker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kayaker/32/441_2.png) [@kayaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayaker)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2015, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-everyone-does-it-logic/738298/21 "2015-11-24T17:59:18Z")
> [@Kimbosquee](#): > > Am I the only one who either finds it funny or shakes my head when people who should be speaking for themselves say some variation of “everyone does it”? No, I think pretty much everyone does it. ---
**Author:** ![stillownedbysetters](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/41988e/32.png) [@stillownedbysetters](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stillownedbysetters)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2015, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-everyone-does-it-logic/738298/22 "2015-11-24T18:53:02Z")
I guess I’m just a contrarian. When someone gives me their version of ‘everyone does it’, I immediately want to do the opposite! ---
**Author:** ![WhyNot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/c77e96/32.png) [@WhyNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WhyNot)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2015, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-everyone-does-it-logic/738298/23 "2015-11-25T13:53:36Z")
> [@stillownedbysetters](#): > > I guess I’m just a contrarian. When someone gives me their version of ‘everyone does it’, I immediately want to do the opposite! Yeah, everyone does that. ( I’m not even really joking.) ---
**Author:** ![epbrown01](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7ba0ec/32.png) [@epbrown01](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/epbrown01)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2015, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-everyone-does-it-logic/738298/24 "2015-11-25T14:36:21Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > I don’t know if “instinct” is the right word, but it is a rationalization. And humans are notorious for rationalizing. This. A former friend was constantly justifying his bad behavior (affairs while he was married, stealing from work) with “everyone does that.” If you claimed you didn’t, you were just lying, in his opinion. His life became more and more of a shambles and it was so unfair because he wasn’t doing anything everyone else wasn’t doing. :rolleyes: Unfortunately, he was just an extreme case of a pretty common outlook. ---
**Author:** ![Grestarian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/grestarian/32/3227_2.png) [@Grestarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grestarian)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2015, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-everyone-does-it-logic/738298/25 "2015-11-25T21:11:55Z")
> [@Napier](#): > > To some degree there’s a kind of wisdom in pointing to things “everybody does”. I don’t mean the habit of finding somebody worse than oneself to enjoy a favorable comparison. I mean, doing the same thing you see practically everybody around you doing, when you don’t have a better way to choose your actions, does actually tend to turn out more or less OK. The racism one is a good example. There’s an analogy out there (youtube? TED?) that says we should think of racism the way we think of dental hygiene. Everybody has some racism in them and occasionally it shows, just like everybody needs to brush their teeth or dentures. We should be able to say “your racism is showing” as safely as we can say “I think you have a bit of lettuce stuck in your teeth”, instead of making “racist” such a hated identity that bringing it up is an insult. The difference, though, is that racism (or, actually, prejudicial discrimination) has damaging effects that ripple through society while a brief lapse in hygiene is pretty benign. People aren’t getting shot for knocking on the wrong door because the resident (or visitor) has a bit of spinach in his teeth but because that visitor bore indicators of a nationality or ethnicity which the resident hated and unthinkingly acted upon that hatred. I was reading this thread late last night and only realized this morning (while compiling quotes for my response) that these two are from the same person. > [@Habeed](#): > > . . . Why should the small percentage the authorities actually catch face severe penalties for something even the authorities themselves probably do? > [@Habeed](#): > > Would you agree that 5 years in prison for stealing grapes would be too much? What if they usually only applied the punishment to people not in your ethnic group? Wouldn’t it feel pretty unfair if one day you ate a grape, cops come out of hiding, cuffing you and slamming you facefirst into the ground (“did you not read the signs, scumbag?!”) and now you are locked in jail, facing the possibility of trial and conviction. > > Wouldn’t it feel a little unfair if you didn’t really know about the law (it’s not well publicized and it was some combination you didn’t know about, like maybe you were carrying an unlawful plant in your pocket at the same time while munching the grape and this somehow “makes it” a felony) and you saw others eating grapes at the produce section last week? > > I’m not just making shit up. People have gotten life sentences for stealing a candy bar. (yeah, ok, it was their next strike, but it still makes the marginal penalty obscene) The conflation is valid enough in that there’s a whole field of sociological inquiry that is only now getting media attention (hype?). This is a facet of the **sociology of power** , with questions like “How is it that the majority of people able to afford illegal drugs are caucasian but the majority of people busted for drug abuse are non-caucasian?” and “Why does Mary get scolded in class for interrupting the teacher when Jim gets an immediate answer after blurting out a question?” However valid, these questions seem a bit of a side-track from the main question. * * * As for the OP, the “everyone does it” phrase is either a fallacy of _hasty generalization_ – assuming from a limited sample that the entire population is the same - based on a sample of one (-self), or a _bandwagon argument_ as Ranger Jeff pointed out. My mother carefully taught me to never ever deal in such hyperbole.😃 For the former excuse, she would say, “No, not everyone. Lots of people, perhaps, but the better of us hold ourselves to a higher standard.” For the bandwagon plea, she would say, “Who says it’s ‘everyone’? And who cares anyway? If ‘everyone’ was jumping off a cliff, would you jump too?” and later, after I had learned enough history, “You know, ‘everyone’ was joining the Hitler Youth groups, too. Do you just want to blindly join everything?” –G! Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law; but because ‘tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to confute him. [COLOR=White]…–John Selden (1584-1654) …posthumously published in Table Talk, 1689[/COLOR] [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-everyone-does-it-logic/738298.md?page=1)