Word.ws English Dictionary

toupee fallacy

toupee fallacy noun: a form of selection bias in which a thing whose quality is measured in terms of being difficult to detect is wrongly judged to be of poor quality in general, caused by the fact that most people only notice poor-quality instances of it.

Noun

toupee fallacy (plural toupee fallacies)

  1. A form of selection bias in which a thing whose quality is measured in terms of being difficult to detect is wrongly judged to be of poor quality in general, caused by the fact that most people only notice poor-quality instances of it.
    • Not all toupees are bad, but you only spot the bad toupees. That's the toupee fallacy.

Forms of toupee fallacy

pluraltoupee fallacies

Origin of toupee fallacy

In reference to the conventional wisdom that all toupees look bad, caused by the fact that good quality toupees are usually not noticed.

Questions about toupee fallacy

What does toupee fallacy mean?
Toupee fallacy means a form of selection bias in which a thing whose quality is measured in terms of being difficult to detect is wrongly judged to be of poor quality in general, caused by the fact that most people only notice poor-quality instances of it.
What part of speech is toupee fallacy?
Toupee fallacy is a noun.
What is the plural of toupee fallacy?
The plural of toupee fallacy is toupee fallacies.

Words near toupee fallacy in the dictionary

  1. toupas
  2. toupases
  3. toupe
  4. toupee
  5. toupee fallacies
  6. toupee fallacy
  7. toupeed
  8. toupees
  9. toupes
  10. toupet
  11. toupets

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: toupee fallacy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “toupee fallacy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/toupee_fallacy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.