A statistic carries an authority that a plain sentence cannot. Say most people prefer this and you sound like you are guessing. Say 78 percent of people prefer this and you sound like you ran a study, even if the number arrived in a dream. It sounds rigorous, and it is trivial to invent. A great deal of bad information lives in that gap.
The questions that deflate a fake number
- Who said it? A statistic with no source is a rumor wearing a percent sign. Any real figure has a name attached to it.
- Who measured it, and how? A number from a company about its own product is not the same as a number from an independent body. Ask who ran the study and whether they had a stake in the result.
- How big was the sample? A finding pulled from a poll of forty people is not exactly wrong, but it cannot carry the weight people keep loading onto it.
- When was it from? A real statistic from 2014 describing a fast-moving market is history, not current evidence, however confidently it gets quoted today.
The circular-citation problem
Fake statistics love to launder themselves through repetition. One site invents or garbles a number, a second cites the first, a third cites the second, and before long the figure is everywhere, each source pointing at another and not one of them pointing at an origin. The number reads as more credible the more it travels, which is exactly backward.
The thirty-second test
Before you repeat a striking statistic, try to trace it back to its original source. Find a real study with a real method, and you can use it. Find that every link just leads to another article quoting the same number, and you have found a rumor in a nice suit. The right move there is to leave it where you found it.
This reflects Encore Editorial's own sourcing habits, applied to ourselves first. Questions go through our contact page.