Anecdotage

From Data Smog, by David Shenk

And so it was written and so it is said that many years ago the great Duwamish Indian Chief Seattle, ruler of six tribes around Puget Sound, became so disgusted by the rapacious behavior of the white race that he sat down and wrote an impassioned letter to the white president, Franklin Pierce. “The earth is our mother,” he avowed. “I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairies left by the white man who shot them from a passing train.” Chief Seattle prodded President Pierce to examine the consequences of his people's actions: “What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires?”

So it is said, and so it is repeated: Not surprisingly, Chief Seattle's eloquent letter has become a pivotal document in the modern environmental movement, excerpted in fund-raising dispatches and read passionately at public demonstrations. Who can fail to be moved by such a noble and tragic petition? The letter invokes a collective social guilt for over a century of ethnic and environmental desecration.

But the document is not authentic. It was written by Texas screenwriter Ted Perry for a 1971 film on ecology. ("I wrote a speech which was fiction,” Perry has acknowledged.) In real life, Chief Seattle was a fierce warrior, noted for his attacks on other Indian tribes. While he was purported to be a master statesman, he surely never laid eyes on a bison or a locomotive, nor could he have heard the chirp of a "whippoorwill:' as Perry's letter also states. None of these three items were to be found within hundreds of miles of Chief Seattle while he was alive.

We can separate fact from fiction here in this book, just as it has been done in The New York Times and in other venues. We can repeat the facts over and over again, like some kind of mantra. But we cannot defeat the power of a good story, which explains why this fictional account of Chief Seattle, Ted Perry's version, has appeared on the “nonfiction" New York Times bestseller book list and has become a central part of Earth Day and other environmental celebrations in recent years. (The book is called Brother Eagle, Sister Sky: A Message from Chief Seattle.) "It's a classic case of a lie going twenty miles an hour when the truth is just putting on its boots,” says historian David Buerge.

Only now lies are even swifter. In the electronic age, a good lie well-told can zip around the world and back in a matter of seconds whiled the truth is trapped, buried under a filing cabinet full of statistics. While our fact-based society has largely overcome a past riddled with destructive myths and superstitions (we now know that disease is caused by microbes, rather than jealous gods, and that volcanic eruptions have nothing to do with virginity), one of the unwelcome consequences of information superabundance is that, in our increasingly distracting environment, we are more susceptible to simplifying, misleading myths.

The Eleventh Law of Data Smog: Beware stories that dissolve all complexity

“The anecdote—selective, exaggerated, or just wrong, as a way of simplifying complicated issues—is back with a vengeance,” says National Public Radio political analyst Daniel Schorr. “True, half true, or untrue, horror stories seem to be the stuff of revolution in the media age.”

If information glut can be likened to the danger of eating too much, anecdotage (a term coined by columnist William Safire) is like scarfing down too many sweets: It is a short -cut to quick pleasure and short-term satisfaction, but ultimately it can be unfulfilling and even dangerous—“empty calories" that can disturb a nutritious regimen. While we have recently been celebrating the power of myth with Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers, and Robert Bly, we must also remember to fear it.

The double-edged quality is palpable. “Without metaphor, thought is inert,” explains literacy scholar Frank Smith, likening the power of metaphor to a road map. People are instinctively able to draw inspiration and guidance from simple yet powerful stories—narratives—around which dry information coalesces and begins to make sense.

But what happens when these road maps for the mind feature roads and rivers that do not exist? Perhaps the most famous contemporary abuse of the anecdote was by Ronald Reagan, the “Great Communicator,” who in the presidential campaigns of 1976 and 1980, railed against a mythical “welfare queen" (never publicly named by Reagan) who had allegedly used eighty aliases, thirty addresses, twelve social security cards, and four nonexistent dead husbands to fraudulently collect $150,000. In fact, the closest actual case was a woman in Chicago who had used two false names to improperly collect $8,000. But Reagan’s story stuck in the public imagination, not only helping him get elected president in 1980 but also propping up draconian welfare reform legislation in 1981. ("This particular initiative is disgusting,” editorialized The Washington Post, at the time. "We suppose that if you persist in viewing all welfare recipients as variations on the spectacular cheaters and 'welfare queens' who are periodically uncovered, it makes sense. But if you believe that welfare recipients are something other than a class of criminals and subhumans who need to be punished ... then you will see this punitive, degrading act for what it is.")

Similarly, in September 1989, in a nationally televised speech from the Oval Office, George Bush displayed a bag of crack cocaine that he said had been seized in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House; it did not matter that the bust had been staged specifically for his speech, and that crack is not regularly sold in Lafayette Park. The anecdote worked. It prompted a terrifying image of thugs dealing drugs in front of the "people's house."

We need not feel foolish for being so easily duped. We are born ready victims; our affinity for myth and metaphor comes hardwired into our brainstems. For most of our natural history, explains psychologist Richard Nisbett, "vivid information" has been the only way to learn. "I'd put it in evolutionary terms,” he explains. “We're accustomed to the use of narrative information. That's the way we learned things in our previous, preliterate cultures. It's a relatively recent thing to learn about the world by statistics and by logical argument.”

To document our reliance on narrative, Nisbett has conducted experiments in which subjects are presented with statistical data that conflicts with a narrative. In these experiments, the narrative always ends up making the dominant impression. In one such test, subjects were introduced to a prison guard who was either a reasonable, decent seeming fellow, or a brutal, bloodthirsty type. Then subjects were presented with hard data about what most prison guards are actually like, and were told to discount the impression they had from their encounter with the token guard. "It turns out,” says Nisbett, "that being told that the guy you were seeing is atypical has absolutely no effect whatsoever on the inferences you make about prison guards in general. It doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is whether we show them a nice guy or a nasty guy. If we show them a nice guy, they think prison guards aren't so bad. If we show them a nasty guy, they think prison guards are really horrible."

A second experiment using welfare as the subject followed the same pattern with exactly the same results. "We show people a wel¬fare case horror-a woman in her fourth generation of welfare, and we preface it by saying, 'Most people on welfare are there on a temporary basis, but we'd like you to read about an atypical case: But it doesn't make a bit of difference whether we say it's typical or atypical. They make their, judgments on welfare based on the people they've seen.”

Psychologists confirm Daniel Schorr's hunch that anecdotage is a particular problem in the context of to day's media age. "With the sophisticated mental apparatus we have used to build world eminence as a species.” Robert Cialdini says of this catch-22, "we have created an environment so complex, fast-paced, and information-laden that we must increasingly deal with it in the fashion of the animals we long ago transcended.” In this way, our information mania has sparked a behavioral devolution.

Journalists, the first line of defense against public deception, regularly fall prey to the power of misleading anecdotes, stories that compellingly fit their preconceived notions or suspicions about people or events. The danger now is that, in their increasing distraction, they too may be falling for them more than ever. Consider several lively political anecdotes of late.

Exhibit A: During the last year of his presidency, on a visit to a local supermarket, George Bush was reported to be baffled by a laser guided grocery checkout scanner. "Bush Encounters the Supermarket, Amazed,” ran The New York Times headline. Bush, who had been ensconced in the White House and the vice-presidential mansion for a total of eleven consecutive years, was thought to have become somewhat out of touch with the common person. Previously, a news story had appeared about how Bush had been unable to figure out a new-fangled gas pump at a gas station. The scanner story was just the confirmation journalists and Bush-skeptics were looking for. They lapped it up. Though the anecdote got wide play, it turned out to be completely false. A New York Times reporter who hadn't even been on the scene had trumped up a much less interesting incident in which the manufacturer of a new-technology scanner was demonstrating its latest wares to Bush. But by the time the truth was discovered and reported, the severe damage to Bush's image was done. "It hurt the president badly in terms of public perception,” writes Bush's press secretary Marlin Fitzwater. He went on to lose the election, largely because he was seen as out of touch with ordinary Americans.

Exhibit B: Headlines and newscasts blared one evening that President Clinton had prevented commuter flights at the Los Angeles Airport from taking off so that renowned Hollywood hairstylist Christopher could give him a leisurely coif on Air Force One. Again, the story also turned out to be false-one unscheduled flight was delayed for two minutes. But again the correction came too late. The original story struck a deep chord with the press and the American people, apparently confirming a suspicion that, now that he was in office, Clinton was also quickly losing his concern for the plight of the common folk. He quite literally wasn't concerned with keeping the trains or planes running on time. His approval ratings took a severe hit.

Exhibit C: In 1989 Rudolph Giuliani ran for Mayor of New York City and lost. On election night, as Giuliani began to deliver an extremely gracious concession speech in a ballroom filled with his supporters, a number of people in the audience loudly booed at the mention of the winning candidate, David Dinkins. Giuliani was understandably annoyed at this and attempted to get people to be quiet. “Quiet,” he implored the crowd several times.

The next day, it was reported that Giuliani had rudely yelled “Shut up!” at his supporters. Though this actually never happened, the anecdote supported the widespread perception that Giuliani was too aggressive and mean-spirited to be an effective mayor; he wasn't genteel enough for the job. Giuliani was forced to apologize for the “shut up” remark, and it dogged him for years, even through his successful rematch campaign against Dinkins four years later.

Years after the alleged incident, after the “shut up” had become a part of New York political lore, a reporter from The New York Times happened to be reviewing a videotape of Giuliani's 1989 concession speech. The headline that ran in the Times the next day: “Famous Line was 'Quiet.' Not ‘Shut Up.’ ”

Anecdotage is such an integral part of our culture, we even have a popular name for important narratives that probably aren't based in fact. We call such stories apocryphal.

APOCRYPHAL \a-'pak-ra-fal\ adj. 1. Of questionable authorship or authenticity. 2. Erroneous; fictitious.

Apocryphal. We grin as we let the word roll off our tongues with a decadent pleasure, sharing an invisible wink with anyone within earshot, saying, implicitly, it's probably a lie-but then so much is these days. This social norm bleeds into the work we do. In both business and politics, we constantly measure our success by the degree to which we are able to manipulate people's impressions through anecdotes.

Often, this gets carried to absurd ends, as when two account executives from the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency boasted in the International Journal of Advertising that a campaign exaggerating the uniqueness of a particular pain reliever had actually had a medical effect on customers. "Double-Blind trials demonstrated that branding accounts for a quarter to a third of the pain relief,” they wrote. "Branding works like an ingredient of its own, interacting with the pharmacological active ingredients to produce some¬thing more powerful than the unbranded tablet."

The hubris in this claim is remarkable. Advertisers are not only proudly laying claim to having a medicinal effect with their commercials, but also justifying their own exaggerated claims about the pain reliever by saying that the exaggerations themselves are therapeutic. The message of this claim is that, since branding has been proven to reduce pain, we need not be concerned about any distortion of the truth along the way. Of course, apocrypha and consumer fraud have been around for ages. But the danger is that in our increasing distraction and speediness, the lies will move so much faster than the truth, they will too often become the truth.