Thought colonization

Thought colonization is a proposed term for a conversational process in which one person takes another person's expressed idea, removes or alters its original context or intention, reconstructs it into a substantially different position, then attributes the reconstructed position back to the original speaker.

For example, one participant might state, “I think woman should be treated the same as men.” Another participant could respond “so you think women should be beaten by men in bar fights” in this example the second participant introduces a position concerning physical violence that was not explicitly stated by the first.

Relationship to the straw man fallacy

The concept overlaps with the straw man fallacy, in which an argument is misinterpreted and the alternate version is subsequently attacked. Thought colonization places particular emphasis on the process by which the altered interpretation is attributed back to the original speaker. In this framing, the straw man is the resulting distorted position, while thought colonization describes the act of reconstructing and reassigning the speakers meaning.