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This well-known saying is part of a phrase attributed to Benjamin Disraeli and popularized in the U.S. by Mark Twain: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." As someone might put it, statistics can be falsified to prove anything. 80% of the world's population knows this — and 54% of the world's comedians have made that joke.

Lies are not allowed in 99% of spheres. Damned lies are about 64% worse, and definitely not allowed. Statistics, however...

With the magic of numbers you can lie without getting into trouble!

This trope covers all instances where statistics are used to deceive people as to the truth. The fact is that roughly 78% of people do not pay attention to the context, just the numbers. For example the statement "85% fat free" sounds really good, until you realize that this means the food product is presumably 15% fat by weight. Also "fastest growing" could just mean that they used to have one customer and got five more, a 500% plus increase.

Around 32% of the uses of statistics are intended to imply a causal link, when either the two elements are not linked, the link is questionable, or the link is actually opposite to what is implied. A beautiful example is "Coca-Cola causes drownings." Looking at statistical data about Coca-Cola sales on a daily basis, and looking at data about drownings and near-drownings on a daily basis, you can see a link — because more people go swimming on hot days and more people buy Coke on hot days, of course! Likewise birth rates (per head of population) are higher in areas where there are more storks. Because birth rates are always higher in rural areas, which is where one finds the Delivery Stork, duh!

Also be aware of the Law of Very Large Numbers. Any fraction of a Very Large Number is likely to be a Large Number, no matter how small the fraction. It is estimated that 2,135,000 Americans have used cocaine (including crack) in the past month. Is this a lot? Not really; it's 0.7%. But it sounds like a lot.

Confirmation bias, or the tendency for people to search out statistics that support their preconceived notions and ignore statistics that don't, is the reason for many of the entries on this list. It's also the reason most scientific and medical studies are done double-blind (meaning, neither the researchers nor the participants know which is the experimental group or the control group.) However, you should beware of any advertisements touting a "double-blind" study, especially late-night ads. Odds are, they're not. Put another way, by Vince Scully, "people use statistics the way a drunk uses a lamp post — for support, not illumination."

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Examples:

• During World War One helmets were almost withdrawn from British soldiers when it was noticed that the rate of head wounds had shot up after their issue. The reason? A "head wound" meant someone who was shot in the head and survived. People who died from a bullet in the brain were instead listed as "fatalities." Since helmets let more people survive, the number of head wounds soared. A politician used the the number to support his position that "helmets are expensive and cause cowardice," and of course never explained what it really meant.
• Something of a historical subversion: During WWII, the air force wanted to add more armour to their planes, but because of weight limits they needed to know which places needed the armour most. So, they examined the planes after they came back and counted how often bullet holes were found in certain areas... and then placed armour in places that showed the fewest bullet holes. This is because, they assumed, that any place that did have bullet holes was a place that planes could be hit and still fly.
• Let's say you want to "prove" that video games cause violence. First, you need to get a group of scientists that are already savvy to this and don't mind the lack of ethics. Then, you have them draw from a very small pool of test subjects that are known to display violent behavior. Mental hospitals, prisons, schools for children with behavior disorders, what have you. Do some generic tests that are guaranteed to show up positive, come up with numbers, and presto, instant headline. "Recent test shows 77% of subjects become more violent after playing Mortal Kombat". This works because the plebs you're trying to convince will not read the article the whole way through. Most will just look at the headline and that's all you really need to quote at speeches and debates. This also works with Comic Books, and with Rock, Hip hop, porn, watching Brokeback Mountain, voting Democratic, voting Republican... actually, every known behavior can be presented to encourage violence and other unpleasant things. Must be a strange subversion of Rule Thirty Four.
  • And if you want even more confusion, consider the FBI study. It proves that video games REDUCE teen crime rates. Specifically, there was a drastic decrease in teen crime rates coinciding with the release of the original Grand Theft Auto. Naturally, the media seems to figure that this means that they're committing 200 million times as many crimes (my hyperbole, not theirs), but that they aren't being reported.
    • There was also a drastic drop in violent crime coinciding with the release of DOOM, the first major FPS.
    • Of course, these findings don't "prove that video games REDUCE teen crime rates" (correlation vs. causation and all that) any more than the ridiculously biased tests above prove the opposite, but they do contradict the latter rather nicely.
    • Doesn't that just prove, that instead of doing crimes, people were home playing games?
    • No, like the guy said above you, correlation does not always indicate causation, but it is a piece of evidence toward your hypothesis, albeit, a single piece....
  • There's an oft-cited study that shows playing violent video games causes abnormal activity in the amygdala (emotional response center), which the media naturally links to violent crime. One professor at a different university was curious and did his own study; he found that Rocky caused the same effect in the same percentage of test subjects. And of course no one in the media has anything against movies.
• An Australian national newspaper once received a letter from a man who was shocked to discover that 50% of Australian children scored lower on test scores than the average. Think about that...
  • But be careful. Question: How many people have more legs than the average? Answer: Almost everyone. This is because the number of three-legged people are greatly outnumbered by one-legged people, so the mean (i.e. the posh accurate mathematical way of saying that which most people think of as the 'average' [total sum divided by number of values]) number of legs is a little bit lower than 2.
  • Similarly, the original shocking fact is only a "no duh" situation if "average" means "median". Ideally, most children would score relatively high on the scale, so it would be possible to be much more of an outlier on the low end than on the high end, so at least a little more than half the children should have grades above the mean.
    • This assumes that the test isn't designed to produce a bell curve, of course.
    • Even if it wasn't designed that way, most measurement statistics will form a variation of a bell curve naturally.
• Consider the following. "Most car accidents occur close to home." The implication from that sentence alone is that somehow being close to home "causes" accidents; perhaps people are less careful. However, add this fact; Most driving occurs close to home.
  • It's a bit like the "statistics" on shark shows. "You are more likely to die on the toilet than be eaten by a shark." When you compare how much time you spend around sharks versus how much time you spend around toilets ... I mean, really, the toilet has time to plan out its move in advance.
  • Same deal with most accidents occurring in the home. Considering that you spend the majority of your time in your home, this should come as no surprise to anyone.
  • At some Reform Judaism synagogues, a popular "joke" to lead into the sermon is, "x% of deaths occur in a hospital, x% of deaths occur in a car, x% of deaths happen in the home...[continues on for a while] while there have been only three deaths in a synagogue, and no deaths ever reported while studying Torah! Clearly, the safest passion, therefore, is studying Torah." (This joke was sadly subverted one Yom Kippur service.)
• One of Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD)'s favourite weapons was a list of over 500 Americans they claimed were gamers who had committed suicide is the same year. Thus role playing games cause suicide. Except that 500 suicides a year is a lower percentage of suicides than clergy and a tiny fraction of the average.
  • Patricia Pulling, the leader of this organisation, once said in an interview that "8% of the Richmond VA-area population is involved with Satanic worship at some level." When asked where that figure came from, she said that she estimated 4% of the teenagers and 4% of the adults. She then added them together and got the 8% (making this a You Fail Statistics Forever as well).
  • Another time, BADD cited an increase in suicides corresponding with a major Dungeons and Dragons release. However there's no evidence that's not simply a coincidence, as similar statistics can be used to prove that the release of a Brittney Spears CD caused suicide numbers to jump.
    • Well...
• Newspapers love doing this with drug related stories. It's almost impossible to see Ecstasy mentioned in a British newspaper without the qualifier "That killer drug", the supporting statistic is of course that a dozen people die per year from consuming it. Yet over the course of a year they will rack up an impressive body count in stories about fatal car accidents without ever devolving into calling cars "Those murderous rampaging kill bots" How many Britons drive? How many take E?
  • Also, how many people who supposedly died from E would still be alive if they were able to get hold of pharmaceutical-grade MDMA in precisely-measured doses at their local pharmacist?
    • Of course this is ridiculous. We don't sell alcohol or tobacco at pharmacists. The substances would be sold through Off Licenses. But this is a different type of unfair debating.
  • A related strategy was used by US president Richard Nixon to portray marijuana as a gateway drug. His anti-drug team estimated that 80% of marijuana users go on to use cocaine, a figure which they obtained by taking the number of cocaine users and dividing it by the number of those users who had started by using marijuana. This ignored the fact that out of all marijuana users, only about one in 2,400 go on to use cocaine.
    • And related to that, most people willing to take a drug as dangerous as cocaine are willing to take a drug as relatively safe as marijuana. It's the same reason most marijuana smokers have drunk alcohol at some point, and why most alcohol drinkers have drunk something with caffeine in it, etc.
    • Water: the Gateway Chemical
• "Nine out of ten dentists recommend Trident for their patients who chew gum." The tenth dentist was insistent that his patients never chew gum at all, but surprisingly, Trident didn't want you to know about that.
  • Trident recently ran a series of commercials in recent years that said "4 out of 5 dentists recommend Trident. But what about the fifth dentist?" They would then proceed to show some horrible fate befall the fifth dentist that prevented him from voting.
  • Nine Out Of Ten Doctors Agree has been practically a stock phrase in advertising since the early 20th century.
  • This kind of pitch was beautifully skewered by Stan Freberg in the early 1960s in an ad for Chun King Chinese food: the nine recommending doctors were all smiling Asians; the tenth, a scowling Anglo.
  • "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette."
  • The great question never answered is: Why do the tenth Doctor/Dentist/Lawyer/Fireman/Whoever doesn't use/approves the product.
    • A Mad Magazine cartoon answered this: "Four out of five dentists recommend you floss daily!" The fifth dentist is a surly-looking individual who mutters "I'm sure you have better things to do with your time.."
    • Pearls Before Swine occasionally has the Five Doctors follow Rat around to comment on his activities. The fifth doctor is ALWAYS The Runt At The End.
  • Truth is, they leave out a crucial bit of information with that pitch. It's "four of our five doctors agree'', they could make up any statistic if they wanted to. (Why not five out of five? That looks suspicious.)
• Yes Minister has a very interesting section on this. In a discussion about conscription, Sir Humphrey demonstrates to Bernard how statistics can be obtained which prove both sides of the discussion correct, through the use of leading questions which are not included in the reporting of the survey concerned.
• Penn & Teller's Bullshit point it by having a man who makes pool research for the Republicans show he can make someone give two different answers to the same question by first asking: "Do you think the government expends too much in healthcare for immigrants?" The bystander answers "Yes". When he asks: "Would you deny an immigrant the right to treat himself? To give birth in a hospital? Etc..." and other medical services that go well beyond what the governments expends with immigrant healthcare, the answer now is: "No". Also, they make fun of the guy with his own mathematical wizardry by pointing out: "In this scene, ten cars pass by behind him. One guy from one of the cars shouts saying he sucks. This means that AT LEAST 10% of the American population believes he sucks".
  • Though there's a significant difference between "deny someone the right to medical treatment" and "give him medical care for free or at a highly-subsidized rate". The omission of "allow him to have it, but he has to pay for it himself" merely reinforces the point that the actual text of the survey questions should be carefully scrutinized before the survey's results can be trusted.
• Darrell Huff's "How To Lie With Statistics" was printed in the 50's. It's usually available on eBay and is a very easy read that shows you all the basics.
• Statistically, there are 2 Popes per square kilometer in the Vatican, which is 1/2 of a square kilometer. Tee-hee, funny joke ... but remember that, the next time someone tells you how many Republicans or Democrats there are in a particular region. Did they count them? No.
  • Well, if you're going by nominal membership in a political party, you can simply look at voter registration records for a given area. Though registration figures cover everyone from the guy who just registers and does nothing else, to someone who campaigns extensively for a particular candidate.
• On average, an adult human has one testicle. Strictly, it's probably less than one — there are very slightly fewer women than men in the world, but a small but significant proportion of men have less than 2 testicles.
• Bayesian Probability throws up a lot of these as it depends on the statement 'the probability of x given y' and how this should affect your perceptions. My favourite is where confessing to a crime is more likely to make you innocent — the idea being that for certain big-ticket crimes like organised crime or terrorism the perpetrators are more likely to be trained in resisting interrogation and will never confess, whereas a 'normal' person will confess, telling the interrogator what they want to hear.
• A recent Ars Technica article discussed the statistics usually used by software developers to complain about piracy. Specifically, the article pointed out that the statistics most commonly cited are most likely not only bullshit, but old bullshit. Amusingly enough, the image used for the related post on Gamepolitics was a pie chart divided into three sections, marked "Lies/Damned Lies/Statistics".
• A recent Trojan Condoms commercial claims that the United States ranks between two African nations in HIV cases. This means nothing, since the population of the USA is much higher than either of those countries!
• Anti-pornography activists sometimes cite studies showing a correlation between areas with higher rates of pornography consumption and higher rates of rape. While this is true, there's an even bigger correlation between rape and the consumption of non-pornographic "manly" magazines like Field and Stream and Guns & Ammo, yet no one suggests that preventing men from reading magazines about hunting and guns would lead to less rape. If you want to go with Guns and Ammo I'm sure certain studies would say that the more freely weapons and ammo are available the higher the murder rate.
  • Those studies have been done, there is an inverse correlation. The US cities with the most restrictive gun laws have the highest murder rates, which is another example of an easily exploited statistic (the actual relationship is hugely complicated and different for each city).
  • Advocating a ban on something because its consumption correlates with rape is very dangerous. Even if there were a causal link, consumption is affected by factors other than availability, and increased availability of pornography reduces rape.
• Even QI falls victim to this from time to time. One question was "What is three times more dangerous than war?" The answer given was work, because three times as many people are killed each year in work-related accidents than die in wars. Now, consider how much time you spent working last year compared to how long you were in a warzone.
  • This of course prompted unhelpful responses from the panellists: "What if you're a soldier?" "What if you work in a shoe shop, near a war?"
    • Well, during war, some people die. During peace, everyone dies.
  • Of course, QI is well known for deliberately phrasing questions like this in order to confuse the participants. See also "how many moons does the Earth have" — Crowning Moment Of Funny as it was, Cruithne and similar objects are near-Earth asteroids in resonant orbits rather than moons in the usual sense.
• Played for laughs in one Dilbert strip: The Pointy Haired Boss is upset because 40% of all sick days are taken on Mondays and Fridays. With a little bit of thought, he would have realized that that's exactly what it should be, since 20% is one out of five, and 40% is two out of five.
• Employees at a certain chain book store were told they needed to get people to sign up for the loyalty card on the grounds that people with the card spend on average $2 more per transaction and thus getting them the card would cause them to spend more. Never mind that most of the loyalty perks were based on how much you spent and thus people who spent more tended to use the card more.
• There is a semi-famous magazine article from 1958 called "The Dread Tomato Addiction" that correlates consumption of tomatoes with everything from death to communism. It can be found here.
  • There is a similar article about bread that can be seen here.
• There have been so many books that claim that they are the number 2 selling book, under the Bible. Isn't there ever a book that sells more than the Bible? How can there be so many number 2's? Or is this at different time periods?
  • No book ever sells more than the Bible because "the Bible" is a very vague term if you're talking about book sales. Which translation? Published when? By whom?
    • And this troper was always under the impression that the biggest selling book was actually the Koran. The Guinness Book Of Records has claimed to be the number 2 in the past.
    • I've heard that among the more orthodox Muslims it is considered a sin to sell the Koran for money, instead they give it away for free and charge for the cover art. This may be apocryphal, however.
    • OK, the Bible and sales, I will go into detail here as it is an interesting and illuminating case of this trope. Fact: There have been more copies of the Bible (here defined as the Christian holy book) sold than any other book. Ever. Estimates range from 2.5 to well over 6 BILLION. However only a handful of specific Bible editions qualify as a best seller and many of those books have huge differences. The Chinese government often claims that there are more copies of 毛主席语录 (Quotations of Chairman Mao or The Little Red Book) in the world than any other book. This is true. However of the 6.5 Billion printed and shipped, over 2/3 are in warehouses as of yet not sold. Some estimates put the actual, genuine, sales at under 800 million. This however does give it a decent claim as most sold specific book as those 6.5 Billion where one edition. القرآن (The Qur’ān or Koran) has sold, again in the same holistic view as we treat the Bible, about 800 million copies, but it is not uncommon to hear people claiming it to have outsold the Bible by using the unfair method of comparing all copies to just the King James Bible, or just the Bible in English, and so on, via the logic that all copies of القرآن are the same and in the same language, whereas the Bible is not (they aren't by the way).
• The Column 8 column in the Sydney Morning Herald once referenced a statistical correlation between the difficulty of the sudoku on a given day and the price of petrol.
• When Ronald Reagan's Attorney General Edwin Meese wanted "proof" that pornography was evil, he created the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography. The commission members were a pre-selected cohort of anti-pornography campaigners. Not surprisingly, they discovered that statistics "proved" that pornography caused crime. However, the 1970 report of the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which was done by honest researchers and was highly praised for accuracy and honesty, discovered that there was "no evidence to date that exposure to explicit sexual materials plays a significant role in the causation of delinquent or criminal behavior among youths or adults."
• There is a book produced for people in radio every year that compiles countless statistics about all stations taken from polls. These are used to attract advertisers. The less successful stations who have very few listeners are often forced to hire people who read through the book to get as many favorable statistics as possible, no matter how convoluted they may be. With the huge amount of data in the book, it's possible to say, for instance, that 85% of married men aged some arbitrary amount with income in some arbitrary range and who own a ferret will love your show, even though they represent a tiny proportion of the population. It does get them advertisers, so it works out in the end.
• The Justice League quote at the top is an often alluded to occurrence of this. Aside from the fact that the same was true before the formation of the League, until the end of time, a significant portion of marriages will end in death, as people do have a tendency to die, married or not.
  • In fact most people would say that marriages ending in death is a good thing.
• In the heated German censorship debate about blocking sites allegedly containing child pornography, an organization in favor of this censorship law ordered a survey at a market research institute with questions basically asking if the person taking the survey is against child pornography and in favor of blocking the websites containing it. Over 90% answered 'Yes' Another survey ordered by an opposing NGO — at the same institute no less — used a slightly different phrasing: Do you agree with blocking the content despite the fact that this content still exists and is easily accessible after the censorship? Over 90% answered with 'No.'
• More than 99% of all murderers in the UK last year were found to be habitual consumers of Dihydrogen Monoxide. It is used by a similarly large fraction of rapists, arsonists, child molestors, and software pirates. It is also known as H2O.
  • Don't forget, it's also been used by all athletes of all sports for "performance enhancement". There's a whole website regarding the dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide.
• An old advert for Guinness ran with the quote "88.2% of statistics are made up on the spot", attributed to Vic Reeves.
• Fletcher Knebel was apparently responsible for "Smoking is the leading cause of statistics", the most famous of which is "100% of non-smokers die".
• There are maths textbooks which demonstrate these sorts of fallacies with examples like "A survey conducted in Central London showed that 80% of drivers drive black cabs."
  • A survey recently conducted in my cubicle suggests that 100% of humans are me.
• There was an Onion article about a movement to shut down hospitals because "despite rapid advancement in medical technology, the world death rate remains at 100%."
  • Another Onion article said that children are universally opposed to children's health care, with responses to the question "Do you want to go to the doctor?" ranging from "NO!!!!" to "inconsolable crying," but no children in favor.
• Jumping off a tall bridge will significantly reduce your chances of dying from cancer.

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