Overgeneraliser

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Someone who applies a conclusion drawn from limited cases to a whole category far too broadly, making sweeping claims from scant evidence
2. A person who jumps to sweeping generalizations based on a few examples and treats them as universal truths
3. One who extends a particular observation into an unjustified rule covering everyone or everything, reasoning from insufficient instances

Etymology: A "generaliser" is someone who draws broad conclusions, and the "over-" prefix adds the sense of going too far. Both parts are old English material. "Over-" comes from Old English "ofer", meaning "above" or "beyond", and it came to mark excess, as in "overeat" or "overdo". The agent ending "-er" also goes back to Old English, where it formed nouns for people who perform an action. The base is the more interesting piece. "Generalise" comes from the Latin "generalis", which means "relating to a whole class or kind", and that Latin adjective grew from "genus", meaning "kind" or "birth". So the root idea of an overgeneraliser is someone who takes a single example and treats it as representing an entire kind, pushing a conclusion past what the evidence supports.

Synonyms: overgeneralizer