Introducing material that is engaging but irrelevant, so attention leaves the question.
The name comes from the practice of dragging cured fish to distract hounds. In institutional settings it is usually unintentional — a genuinely interesting side issue absorbs the meeting the main question needed.
In practice
- A meeting derailed by a genuinely interesting tangent that nobody introduced deliberately.
- A cross-examination that spends its time on an inconsistency about the weather, and the jury remembers the inconsistency.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- What happens to a message after it is sent