Selective reporting
From RationalWiki
Selective reporting refers to rare events which are widely reported, thereby altering the perception of people as to how common they actually are. This is common amongst practictioners of bullshit, where they selectively report their successes but do not publish or mention their numerous failures.
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[edit] The lottery
Selective reporting is best shown with examples. The easiest example is with the a lottery, such as the The National Lottery in the UK or its even grander and larger Europe-wide counter-part, EuroMillions. It's clear to anyone with a grasp of maths that it's rare to win the lottery; indeed if you work out the odds of dying from a heart attack and divide this through until you get the odds of having one in the next hour, you have a higher chance of having a heart attack in the hour leading up to the Lottery than you do of actually winning it. However, the millions of people who wasted their time, energy and money get zero coverage, but the winners often get paraded around; "look, you really can win the lottery, it happened to me!". This alters peoples perceptions to think that the Lottery may well be worth playing, when frankly, the money you have to spend just doesn't add up in a rational way.
This doesn't alter the thrill of gambling, and the though that you might just win, however.
[edit] School shootings
The Columbine massacre terrified people all over the US, leading to ridiculous over-compensation such as metal detectors at school entrances to protect our babies. Statistically, the shooting was irrelevant - despite widely reported shootings in schools and colleges and their presence in modern culture, they are in fact very rare events. Dying in such an event is even rarer, even though any death in such a circumstance is a tragedy, the number of people killed in school shootings only infrequently go into double figures and they are almost invariably isolated incidents.[1] At least one RW editor wrote a lame song about this phenomenon.
[edit] Psychics
Because people have difficulty in processing genuine probabilities, they can often selectively report events to themselves. For example, some people claim "psychic connections" with friends and can tell when they are about to call. This idea is reinforced every time they think of a friend and they do call, however much time later, but it is not refuted everytime they think of a friend and they don't call. Similarly, cold-reading mediums will happily cite the time that they were correct, that the universe conspired to beat the odds that one time. Indeed, if they're having no luck with someone, they'll stop, switch over to another topic that might work (or even more deceitfully, to a planted member of the audience) and repeatedly go on about this thing that worked, rather than even acknowledge the failure.
Ghosts and hauntings have a similar effect. No one cares about the hundreds of people who visited the "most haunted pub in England" and saw nothing, but the local press and storytellers will happily harp on, at great length, about the two or three who did.
[edit] In medicine
This is unfortunately a very serious application of the use of selective reporting, particularly during health scares. Vaccines and their side-effects are commonly selectively reported, and facts and citations are often cherry picked too. Side-effects are inevitable with all medical interventions, but they're usually very rare, reasonably mild and much less risky than leaving an illness well alone. However, in the hands of the media, and the right publicity people pushing for it, the minor incidents of side effects can be happily blown out of all proportion and appear as real, commonplace risks. For example, when one girl died after receiving the HPV vaccine in September 2009, it was widely reported in the national media.[2] Almost no coverage was given to the 1.4 million girls who received the vaccine, had no reaction to it and will now go through their lives with a much reduced risk of cervical cancer - "Girl Gets Vaccine; Doesn't Fall Ill" doesn't make for an impressive headline. Selective reporting in these cases serves nothing but the self-interests of newspapers and magazines that want to sell more copies by dramatising a story. Reports like this take exceptionally rare events and thrust it into the public eye so hard that people have almost no choice but to think "but it could happen to me" and panic.
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Wikipedia - List of school related attacks (Also note that this is not a new phenomenon.)
- ↑ For instance, here's a Guardian article, although it does at least mention the girls who got it safely.
