The Anecdote isn’t Evidence, it’s Representation

Human beings are made from stories. Stories guide our lives, they tell us who we should be, who we want to be. They connect us to everyone else who shares our story and they allow us to understand the world in a way that facts and figures simply fail to achieve. Stories have power.

That’s why so many causes use a personal story as a rallying cry instead of merely reciting the evidence of a problem. Rosa Parks, Tamir Rice, Matthew Shepard. What motivates people is not the number of deaths, not the injustice to a group, but the loss of a specific person, a story that allows them to step into the shoes of the oppressed and experience pain through a shared reality. It works, but it generates a counter-productive reaction.

Since it’s well-known than an anecdote does not equal evidence, anyone opposed to the message a story carries will then attack that story to destroy the entire narrative. They focus on the particulars of the story, on the flaws or discrepancies every story has since no single action represents the whole in every detail. They dismiss it as mere anecdote and don’t bother with the underlying facts that create the sentiment behind the story. Segregation, racial injustice, women’s inequality - these are concepts too big and powerful to deny, too socially reprehensible to defend, so they approach from the side: that particular black man wasn’t innocent, that particular women wasn’t discriminated against.

And they may be right. There are always cases where the injustice is vague or circumstantial, where multiple factors make a single cause insufficient. So they may be technically correct to deny the story in its details. But that misses the point. The details of any one story don’t matter. The representation is never complete or perfect, so to pick it apart accomplishes nothing but distract from the reality behind the story. That’s what they don’t want to face. Maybe Trayvon Martin wasn’t innocent, but stereotyping of black youths and violence against them is impossible to deny. Maybe Ellen Pao lost her case, but the horrible record of Silicon Valley on women’s rights and equality is all too stark in the data. If you can’t answer the bigger picture problem, don’t tear down a single story and expect it to refute the whole.