The furtive fallacy is an informal fallacy of emphasis in which outcomes are asserted to have been caused by the hidden misconduct or wrongdoing by decision makers. Historian David Hackett Fischer identified it as the belief that significant facts of history are necessarily sinister, and that "history itself is a story of causes mostly insidious and results mostly invidious." It is more than a conspiracy theory in that it does not merely consider the possibility of hidden motives and deeds, but insists on them. In its extreme form, the fallacy represents general paranoia.