Title: Anecdotal evidence | Psychology Wiki | Fandom
Headings: Anecdotal evidence
Anecdotal evidence
Contents
Introduction
Scientific context
Anecdotal evidence and faulty logic
Law
Scientific evidence as legal evidence
References
Bibliography
See also

Content: Researchers may use anecdotal evidence for suggesting new hypotheses, but never as supporting evidence. Anecdotal evidence and faulty logic
Anecdotal evidence is often unscientific or pseudoscientific because various forms of cognitive bias may affect the collection or presentation of evidence. For instance, someone who claims to have had an encounter with a supernatural being or alien may present a very vivid story, but this is not falsifiable. This phenomenon can also happen to large groups of people through subjective validation . Anecdotal evidence is also frequently misinterpreted via the availability heuristic, which leads to an overestimation of prevalence. Where a cause can be easily linked to an effect, people overestimate the likelihood of that the cause does have that effect (availability). In particular, vivid, emotionally-charged anecdotes seem more plausible, and are given greater weight. A related issue is that it is usually impossible to assess for every piece of anecdotal evidence, the rate of people not reporting that anecdotal evidence in the population. A common way anecdotal evidence becomes unscientific is through fallacious reasoning such as the post hoc fallacy, the human tendency to assume that if one event happens after another, then the first must be the cause of the second. Another fallacy involves inductive reasoning.