Anecdotes or Statistics?

Arjada Bardhi and Nina Bobkova

No 21737, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Why might persuaders favor anecdotes over aggregate statistics? We study a policy advocate choosing between them to persuade a diverse, skeptical citizenry with demographically correlated outcomes. Two forces compete: an umbrella effect, by which everyone responds more strongly to the statistic, and a wild-card effect, by which the anecdote's higher variance makes favorable realizations likelier. The anecdote prevails under sufficiently narrow consensus, so its appeal has a rational, informational basis. When breadth of aggregation is flexible, the optimal evidence is a local statistic that aggregates over a broader subpopulation than the minimal winning coalition, though almost anecdotal as consensus narrows.

Keywords: anecdotal evidence; statistical evidence; Persuasion; Gaussian processes; Voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D82 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-07
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