Understand how psychological fallacies relate to good arguments.

• Recognize that fallacious arguments often appeal to powerful emotions in order to win agreement.
• Also realize however that an appeal to emotion might be justified depending on the claim being considered.

Understand the specific emotions at work among a group of fallacies and how those emotions carry the persuasive weight of the fallacies.

• Learn to spot the "argument" from outrage and the difference between it and a legitimate appeal to anger.
• Recognize what emotions are driving an example of scare tactics or an "argument" by force.
• Be familiar with the appeals to pity, envy, self-regard, and guilt, that are at work (respectively) in the "argument" from pity, the "argument" from envy, apple polishing, and the guilt trip.
• Understand that rationalizing often has an emotional basis too.

Become familiar with the other group of fallacies that persuade not so much by appealing to emotions as by resting upon commonly held beliefs.

• Learn how to identify and define the fallacy called the peer pressure "argument." Understand that this reasoning is only fallacious if the peer's activities are used as a reason for calling a claim true.
• Understand the bad reasoning here called the group think fallacy.
• Be able to identify the "argument" from popularity and differentiate between the times when it is acceptable to believe a claim based on an authority and the times when this practice is mistaken.
• Understand the "arguments" from common practice and from tradition and be able to distinguish them from the "argument" from popularity.
• Recognize how small-scale fallacies from this group can be inflated into the philosophical doctrines of relativism and subjectivism and learn how to identify those doctrines.

Become familiar with another group of fallacies that function by importing irrelevant considerations into a discussion.

• Understand the bad reasoning "two wrongs make a right" and be comfortable with identifying it.
• Be able to identify uses of smokescreens and red herrings as well as (whenever possible) telling these two kinds of bad argument apart.