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The Allure Of Anecdote
Why we’re suckers for a simple story
The most successful communicators use short simple stories to convey their message. Ronald Reagan successfully distorted US politics for decades with his anecdote about a “welfare queen.” Every low-IQ bigot will claim that “immigrants steal our jobs” because of an anecdote they think they heard somewhere. The news media relies on anecdotes to power its endless sensationalism.
Anecdotes, however, are nearly always misleading. They are usually the edge-case, the exception, or the unverifiable.
So why do totally unrepresentative anecdotes have so much power to shape our perceptions and beliefs?
For nearly all of our evolutionary history, we humans lived in small groups. The range of skills we needed to acquire in order to meet environmental challenges was limited, and all human skills were acquired by copying someone else who could already do it. Until very recently indeed, the concept of innovation was alien to us. We used the same basic flint technology for over two million years; everything since then has happened (from the perspective of evolution) in the blink of an eye. So our brains aren’t adapted to cope with large numbers of people and complex situations in which potentially hundreds of independent variables may be operating.
