World since Biden in White House

I read about a gallup poll and the headline (not written by gallup) read: "Poll: Entire World ‘Unhappier, More Stressed’ Since Joe Biden Took Over."

Can you detect a fallacy in the headline? 

The headline is true in that the data gets worse since 2020...

But...

The Gallup report does not mention Biden at all so we are prompted to ask what the motivation was for mentioning him in the headline.

To understand the headline's meaning we need to consider the language game being played.

The data was getting worse before Biden came to office so mentioning him is misleading, indicating an intention to influence rather than just inform.

The headline writers have been cherry picking from the data sample.

If the intention was to imply that Biden's ascension was the cause of the data then it falls foul of causal reductionism and post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Assuming that we accept as true that the entire world is, in fact, unhappier and more stressed, the fallacy seems to be the assumption that a correlation (Biden as President ... <–> ... unhappier, stressed people) means that one factor caused the other.

Beyond that, the hyperbole in the headline ("Entire World" vs. a bit over half of the world's "countries and areas") goes a long way to make the truth of the headline questionable.  As well, defining "unhappy and stressed" in terms of "five different negative experiences on the (previous) day" seems to leave a lot of subjectivity in data and what they are actually telling us.

The headline is certainly misleading and I would say causes people to be jumping to conclusions . The implied argument would be:

The Entire World is ‘Unhappier, More Stressed’ Since Joe Biden Took Over. Therefore, Joe Biden is the Reason The Entire World is ‘Unhappier, More Stressed’.

This is a fine example of lying with statistics . It is also true that The Entire World is ‘Unhappier, More Stressed’ Since Trump Became President. The fact is, the index they are using has shown negative experiences climbing since 2007.

If we were to play along and accept that Biden is the cause for the negative experiences, even then we would be dealing with the fallacy causal reductionism . At best, this would be an insignificant cause . Conservatives would understandably be 'Unhappier, More Stressed’ when a democrat is in office, but this wouldn't explain why liberals might feel 'Unhappier, More Stressed’. But, we shouldn't play along with the inference. There are many factors that contribute to the negative experience index they are using that pre-date Biden's presidency by decades.

I would say its a kind of non sequitur fallacy called the questionable cause fallacy and they are using them to scapegoating Biden with. Correlation does not mean causation. The author of this is exploiting the fact that the poll and Biden being president correlate. But, so do a lot of other things that have nothing to do with it, and so they exploited that by cherry picking Biden to manipulate people for political purposes (propaganda). Since a lot of the worlds messes began in 2020, and in the poll it shows the index going up from 28 to 32 during Trumps presidency and then from 32 to 33 under Biden. Thats4 points under Trump and one point under Biden. So, one could use the same logic and say it was all Trumps fault, but I am guessing the author would be very angry if someone on the flip side tried to do that. Psychological projection.