We were planning a trip to the city, intending to do some sightseeing and have a good meal. Sharing with a friend I was then told a story about his cousin who was there last month and got beat up on the street by a young adult of another race. You might be thinking that rioting and violence in the city is really bad and we should cancel our trip.
Intellectually most people know that if you have incorrect data or evidence, you will likely have wrong explanations or ineffective solutions. Bad input will result in bad output. We also have cognitive biases that will lead us astray in evaluating the evidence we are using for our conclusions. In the example about my trip to the city, you can probably see the information that is vivid, personal, or concrete might have a greater impact on our thinking. Any statistical or abstract assessments, like actual crime rate statistics, will likely be given less consideration as a result. But is this correct?
Just like that guy’s cousin’s experience, if I were to see a news story about a carjacking instead, I might conclude that going to the city would be a bad idea. That anecdotal experience would also be vivid in my mind and could influence my decision. However it is only one piece of evidence and feeding into a cognitive bias that could lead to an incorrect conclusion.
A critical thinker recognizes that one piece of anecdotal evidence should not drive an overall assessment. That guy who saw the same thing, is just one more single piece of evidence. Even assuming the described situation is true (though we have learned that perceptions are not absolute), it could be the complete opposite of reality with the city being one of the safest ones in the country where that single incident of violence was mainly news because it was so far from the norm.
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