“Remember your math: An anecdote is not a trend.”
– Steven Pinker
I like this quote from Pinker, but beyond the sheer numerical truth of his point, it got me thinking about other ways in which anecdotes can be dangerous for decision making. Let’s unpack what exactly an anecdote is by taking a look at its definition.
An anecdote is a brief, revealing account of an individual person or an incident. Occasionally humorous, anecdotes differ from jokes because their primary purpose is not simply to provoke laughter but to reveal a truth more general than the brief tale itself, such as to characterize a person by delineating a specific quirk or trait, to communicate an abstract idea about a person, place, or thing through the concrete details of a short narrative. An anecdote is “a story with a point.”
This is to say that, anecdotes, or more specifically, the people telling them, have an agenda, they have a point to make, they are actively trying to convince you of something. And if told well, like any good story, they can be remarkably effective, often doing an excellent job of posing as an objective recounting of an event.
This isn’t to say that there isn’t value or truth in anecdotes, they can, of course, be used in good faith to more compellingly make a point that’s backed up by evidence and in the best interest of the recipient. A tale about someone becoming sick from smoking for instance. But for every one of these, there is someone trying to sell you a diet book with the story of how “Martha lost 20kg eating only eggs and grapefruit.”
As with any recounting, anecdotes are subject to the same truths of subjective meaning-making as any other story told by an individual. Even assuming good will and no active attempt at manipulation on the part of the teller, an anecdote is still a re-telling of something that has passed through their reality filters. Consciously or unconsciously deleting information that doesn’t fit their agenda, distorting objective elements by layering on their beliefs and values, generalising things based on their own partial experience of the world as a frame of reference.
There could be, of course, objective facts contained within an anecdote that may be compelling enough to influence a decision. I.e. an individual acted in an undeniably reprehensible way. Or an unquestioned action, positive or negative, was taken that is material to you.
But, these black and white cases aside, if you’re making a decision of any consequence, a single anecdote is generally a poor place to start.