Concept · Cognitive Bias: Informal fallacies of relevance
Ad hominem (circumstantial)
Origin: Traditional rhetoric
Biological Parallel
Vervet monkeys give different alarm calls for eagles versus leopards, but they also track which individuals give false alarms. When a known 'cry wolf' monkey signals danger, others respond more cautiously—not because the logic is flawed, but because the source's incentives matter for survival. Dismissing arguments based on the speaker's circumstances is a heuristic that evolved to detect cheaters and free-riders, where motivational context genuinely predicted signal reliability.