Anecdotal Evidence

Anecdotal Evidence

Whether it is in professional, business, or personal life, a good story is a verbal equivalent of a picture that is worth the proverbial thousand words. Anecdotes, which are brief, often amusing or humorous revealing accounts of a person or an event, have the power to capture attention and deliver a clear message. Widely used to convey abstract ideas underpinning many core human values such as morality or justice, anecdotes have been used by teachers and preachers to deliver important messages, as it has been long known that people are more likely to remember notable rather than typical examples. But that, however, can also be a problem.

Any informal account or a testimonial can become anecdotal evidence. In most situations, anecdotal evidence is limited to either a single case (an event or an individual) or a very small set of cases, and it is intended to communicate a specific story, often in the form of a personal account or testimony. For instance, a person may argue against compulsory use of seatbelts by citing an example of an acquaintance who was not wearing a seatbelt while driving, got in a head-on collision as a result of which was ejected from the car, which shortly thereafter burst into flames. Using that example as anecdotal evidence, the individual then may claim had his friends been wearing the seatbelt he would have likely died in the ensuing fire; thus, seatbelt laws should be abolished. This hypothetical case illustrates the key characteristics of anecdotal evidence which are face value truthfulness (the event either actually occurred or its occurrence is plausible) and non-typicality (the event represents a rare, isolated example). Although in that particular case not wearing a seatbelt might have indeed resulted in a better outcome, that is a very atypical, rare case and there are many more instances where wearing a seatbelt prevented, or at least materially diminished accident-related injuries.

Implicit in the notion of an anecdote is that such evidence does not need to meet any specific standards of appropriateness, or to use more scientifically clear language, it does not need to exhibit satisfactory degree of validity and reliability. In most instances, to be appealing, anecdotal evidence is expected to be on-point, which is to say it needs to depict a topically related person or situation, in addition to also being interesting. However, as noted earlier, it is usually the atypical cases or situations that are interesting and memorable however, being atypical renders such examples nonrepresentative, which can be problematic from a decision-making perspective. Unorthodox business schemes that led to successful outcomes are described in case studies and many business schools devote substantial parts of their teaching to dissecting those preternatural cases, ultimately further conditioning future business managers to trust anecdotal evidence. Unique events, maverick leaders, and norm-bucking choices are all so much more colorful and thus captivating than systematic and persistent review and synthesis of a broad spectrum of representative evidence, in the same sense that overnight sensation, rags-to-riches success stories are so much more captivating than a slow and predictable building of a successful career. Years of formal and informal education instill in all of us fascination with the rare and the atypical, leading to an almost natural acceptance of anecdotal evidence as sufficient proof.

And to be fair, there are notable instances where atypical offers the best guidance – after all, just replicating the ways of the past is unlikely to produce new, in the sense of different, future. In fact, now dominant companies such as Google, Amazon, or Walmart all started by breaking with established norms. However, from an organizational decision-making standpoint, the vast majority of decisions made by the vast majority of decision-makers are of operational nature – as such, those decisions entail predominantly tactical resource allocation and related choices, where preponderance of evidence likely offers better decision-guiding insights than out-of-the-ordinary cases.