# Anecdotal evidence

*Also called: Argument from personal experience*

- **Cluster:** Evidence and sampling — The data that was gathered, and the data that was not
- **Page:** https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/anecdotal/
- **In Arabic:** https://fallacy.wiki/ar/fallacy/anecdotal.md
- **Licence:** CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

## What it is

Preferring a vivid personal story over systematic data.

## In the wild

> My uncle smoked and lived to 90, so smoking is safe.

## How to answer it

Ask how the story compares to the rate across all cases.

## Origin and naming

From the Greek 'anekdotos', 'unpublished' — originally a label for private stories, not courtroom testimony. The term hardened into a warning once science made systematic sampling the standard: one striking case is not a dataset. Popular retellings sometimes call it the 'Volvo fallacy' or the 'person-who' fallacy ('I know a person who...').

## More places it shows up

- The reviews page is full of five-star stories from people who 'never felt better' after the detox tea, so the nutritionist on the panel dismisses the null trial result.
- At the family gathering, an uncle waves away sunscreen statistics: his grandfather worked the fields bare-headed for sixty years and 'never had a spot'.
- A manager vetoes the remote-work pilot because his cousin's startup 'went fully remote and collapsed in six months'.
- Under a viral post about a vaccine side effect, thousands of commenters swap alarming personal stories while the linked study showing rarity goes unclicked.

## How to spot it

- The story is always vivid, named, and close — a friend, a relative, 'a guy I know' — while the data is abstract and far away.
- Ask 'how many cases are we not hearing?' and the room goes quiet; the sample was never counted, only performed.
- The storyteller treats changing the subject to their story as if it answered the statistical question.

## Nearby

- [Hasty generalization](https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/hasty-generalization.md)
- [Cherry picking](https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/cherry-picking.md)
- [Survivorship bias](https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/survivorship.md)

## Read more

- [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence)
- [The Fallacy Files](https://www.fallacyfiles.org/volvofal.html)

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From fallacy.wiki — a bilingual field guide to 91 logical fallacies, published by phi holdings. Licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/): reuse freely with attribution to fallacy.wiki.