Anecdotal evidence

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Anecdotal evidence is evidence based only on personal observation, collected in a casual or non-systematic manner.

Anecdotal evidence comes in three major forms.

1. Relaying personal experiences or sense data, also called testimony, or a testimonial.

2. Relaying the words or experiences of another named person, sometimes called hearsay.

3. Relaying an account from an source with no attribution, also called an apocryphal saying, an Old Wives' Tale, or folklore.

Because the term connotes three very different kinds of evidence, discussion of the term can result in accidental or intentional equivocation , where people are talking about different meanings of the term without realizing it. Since an anecdote may be real or fictional, it is often difficult to talk about this form of evidence as a category without explaining exactly what type of anecdotal evidence is being referenced.

Anecdotal Evidence usually is not subject to rules of legal, historical, academic, or intellectual rigor, meaning that there are little or no safeguards against fabrication or inaccuracy. This does not mean that all anecdotal evidence is false, it just means that the methodology of scholarly method or the scientific method, or legal requirements of testimony have not been required of the evidence.

When used in advertising or promotion of a product, service, or idea, anecdotal reports are often called a testimonial, which are highly regulated in some jurisdictions.

Anecdotal evidence may be considered within the scope of scientific method as some anecdotal evidence can be both empirical and verifiable, e.g. in the use of case studies in medicine. Other anecdotal evidence, however, does not qualify as scientific evidence, because its nature prevents it from being investigated by the scientific method, for instance, in that of folklore or in the case of intentionally fictional anecdotes. Where only one or a few anecdotes are presented, there is a chance that they may be unreliable due to cherry-picked or otherwise non-representative samples of typical cases. Similarly, psychologists have found that due to cognitive bias people are more likely to remember notable or unusual examples rather than typical examples. Thus, even when accurate, anecdotal evidence is not necessarily representative of a typical experience. Accurate determination of whether an anecdote is typical requires statistical evidence. Misuse of anecdotal evidence in the form of argument from anecdote is an informal fallacy and is sometimes referred to as the "person who" fallacy ("I know a person who..."; "I know of a case where..." etc.) which places undue weight on experiences of close peers which may not be typical.

Scientific context

See also: Scientific evidence

In science, definitions of anecdotal evidence include:

• "casual observations or indications rather than rigorous or scientific analysis"
• "information passed along by word-of-mouth but not documented scientifically"
• "evidence that comes from an individual experience. This may be the experience of a person with an illness or the experience of a practitioner based on one or more patients outside a formal research study."
• "the report of an experience by one or more persons that is not objectively documented or an experience or outcome that occurred outside of a controlled environment"

Anecdotal evidence can have varying degrees of formality. For instance, in medicine, published anecdotal evidence by a trained observer (a doctor) is called a case report, and is subjected to formal peer review. Although such evidence is not seen as conclusive, researchers may sometimes regard it as an invitation to more rigorous scientific study of the phenomenon in question. For instance, one study found that 35 of 47 anecdotal reports of drug side-effects were later sustained as "clearly correct."

Anecdotal evidence is considered the least certain type of scientific information. Researchers may use anecdotal evidence for suggesting new hypotheses, but never as validating evidence.

If an anecdote illustrates a desired conclusion rather than a logical conclusion, it is considered a faulty or hasty generalization.

In any case where some factor affects the probability of an outcome, rather than uniquely determining it, selected individual cases to prove nothing; e.g. "my grandfather smoked two packs a day until he died at 90" and "my sister never smoked but died of lung cancer". Anecdotes often refer to the exception, rather than the rule: "Anecdotes are useless precisely because they may point to idiosyncratic responses."

In medicine, anecdotal evidence is also subject to placebo effects.

Legal

In the Legal sphere, anecdotal evidence, if it passes certain legal requirements and is admitted as testimony, is a common form of evidence used in a court of law. Often this form of anecdotal evidence is the only evidence presented at trial. Scientific evidence in a court of law is called physical evidence, but this is much rarer. Anecdotal evidence, with a few safeguards, represents the bulk of evidence in court.

The legal rigors applied to testimony for it to be evidence is under oath, and that the person is only testifying to their own words and actions, and that someone intentionally lying under oath is subject to perjury. However, these rigors do not make testimony in a court of law equal to scientific evidence as there are far less legal rigors. Testimony about another person's experiences or words is called hearsay. However, any hearsay that is not objected to or thrown out by a judge is considered evidence for a jury. This means that trials contain quite a bit of anecdotal evidence, which is considered as relavant evidence by a jury. Eyewitness testimony (which is a form of anecdotal evidence) is considered the most compelling form of evidence by a jury.

See also

• Anecdotal value
• Argument from ignorance – Informal fallacy
• Confirmation bias – Bias confirming existing attitudes
• Correlation does not imply causation – Refutation of a logical fallacy
• Empirical evidence – Knowledge acquired by means of the senses
• Eyewitness testimony – Account a witness gives in the courtroom of what they observed
• Fallacy – Argument that uses faulty reasoning
• Faulty generalization – Conclusion made on the basis of one or few instances of a phenomenon
• Hasty generalization – Conclusion made on the basis of one or few instances of a phenomenonPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• List of fallacies – List of faulty argument types
• Lived experience – Phenomenological concept
• Post hoc ergo propter hoc – Fallacy of assumption of causality based on sequence of events
• Presumption of guilt – Presumption that a person is guilty of a crime
• Scientific method – Interplay between observation, experiment, and theory in science