Basic Trope: A person thinks the position in the middle is always the right one, even when it makes no sense.
- Straight: Alice says an hour is 60 minutes, while Charlie says it's 100. Bob says it must be 80 minutes.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice says "two plus two equals four," Charlie says "two plus two equals six." Bob says the correct answer must be that two plus two equals five.
- Grey-and-Gray Insanity
- Downplayed: Bob thinks Both Sides Have a Point, even when one side is clearly much better.
- Inverted:
- Black-and-White Insanity.
- Bob likes both tea and coffee, but Alice thinks he can't be a real tea drinker if he likes coffee at all, and Charlie believes vice versa.
- Justified: Bob wants to avoid conflict at all costs, so he refuses to take sides even when doing so would be logical.
- Subverted: Alice expects Bob, who has a reputation as an Extreme Doormat, to do this just to keep the peace. He surprises her by backing up her statement instead.
- Double Subverted: When Charlie gets offended, Bob changes his stance to a nonsensical middle ground.
- Parodied: A group of people are all arguing over how many minutes are in an hour. Bob calculates the average between their claims, then confidently asserts the (wrong) answer as an absolute fact.
- Averted:
- Bob points out Alice is right, and an hour is 60 minutes.
- Alice and Charlie don't disagree about basic facts like this.
- Lampshaded: "It's the middle ground, so it has to be right!"
- Enforced: "We need to show Bob has Grey-and-Grey Insanity."
- Invoked: Bob gets caught in the middle of so many conflicts and false dichotomies, he goes too far in the other direction and develops this mentality.
- Exploited: Betty uses Bob's reflexive habit of using the average every time against him: she tells him to meet her in an hour, knowing he'll think it's eighty minutes. When he arrives twenty minutes late, she chews him out.
- Defied: "I'm not going to compromise when it comes to facts. The answer is sixty."
Back to Golden Mean Fallacy
