Earlier, we made the distinction between matters of fact and matters of opinion. It is a distorted version of the reasonable practice of accepting the claim from a reasonable authority. Because people may in fact be experts on a subject, you must take care in distinguishing between good and bad versions of this reasoning. It seeks to justify an action on the grounds of its familiarity or typicality. It differs from appeal to belief in that it specifically aims at calling an action acceptable, without mentioning the beliefs people may have about what they commonly do.
People often act in a certain way because their friends do.
A crowd has often been swept up behind a candidate or consumer product, the victim of fashion. But this behavior in itself is not pseudoreasoning. When you go along with friends or a mob to gain social acceptance, you are reasoning correctly about what will get you accepted, whether or not that acceptance is what is best. The phenomenon turns into pseudoreasoning only when one cites the peers or crowd s activity as a reason for the truth of a claim. Voting for the most popular political candidate in order to feel at one with your community is, though unwise perhaps, not pseudoreasoning.