Why one vivid story outweighs a general fact every time

A detailed example arrives with pictures attached, and the picture is what stays when the argument has faded.

Tell someone that a particular brand of kettle is reliable and they will nod. Tell them your neighbour's identical kettle failed in a shower of sparks after three weeks and they will not buy that brand. The second piece of information is enormously weaker, being a single case, but it arrives with sound and colour and a person attached, and it is available to recall in a way a general statement never is. Vividness and weight are not the same property, and we sort by the first while believing we are sorting by the second.

The mechanism is not mysterious. When judging how common something is, we tend to consult how easily an example comes to mind, and ease of recall is driven by how striking and recent the example was, not by how typical. So dramatic and rare events feel frequent, while the quiet ordinary ones feel like they hardly happen. In everyday choices this mostly leads to minor waste. It leads to more than that when the vivid case comes from someone with a reason to tell it, which is why testimonials are made of stories and not of summaries.

The counter is not to ignore stories, which are often the only evidence available and are excellent at showing what a problem actually looks like. It is to ask a second question after hearing one: how many of these would I need to hear before it counted, and is one of them all I have. Then ask what you would expect the world to look like if the story were an outlier. Usually it would look exactly like this, which tells you the story has not moved things nearly as far as it feels like it has.