Tyler Cowen talks brilliantly about the fallacy of “mood affiliation,” which usually involves feeling an urgent need to counter optimism or pessimism towards a certain topic. It overlaps with “confirmation bias” and “cherry-picking,” and I find myself committing this fallacy quite often. For instance, I think climate scientists have engaged in alarmist predictions that are already failing to come true, so I like to dismiss as exaggeration any evidence of negative things happening to the environment. When you suffer from mood affiliation, you are so opposed to an extreme viewpoint that you feel the need to argue against anything that even comes close to that viewpoint for the fear that it helps validate the extreme viewpoint, even though the truth may lie somewhere between.
One topic that attracts mood affiliation from all over the spectrum is the threat of violence from radicalized American Muslims. I certainly believe there are those who overplay this threat, from conservative Republican voters fretting about Sharia law and TV shows about Muslims, to neo-conservatives looking to justify war, to the federal government making excuses to creep onto our freedoms via the TSA and other civil liberty intrusions. They are the pessimists in this exercise. Osama bin Laden is dead, al Qaeda is weakened, and it’s been ten years since 9/11. What do we still have to be afraid of?