Found out my book club was citing a fake statistic for months

So I was prepping for our monthly debate on ‘The Great Gatsby’ and stumbled onto an article saying 78% of high schoolers think Gatsby is about the 1920s party scene. That number felt weirdly high, so I tracked it back to a single blog post from 2015 with no source at all. Turns out our group had been using that stat in three different meetings, and nobody ever checked it. Has anyone else found a ‘fact’ in a book club discussion that was totally made up?

3 comments

3 Comments

keith27410d ago

Oh man, that's exactly the kind of thing that drove me crazy in my old sci-fi book club. We spent two whole meetings arguing about a supposed study that said 65% of people couldn't name a single female sci-fi author from before 2000. Someone had pulled it from a random forum post, and I finally found the actual source was a 2008 poll with like 30 people on a niche fan site. Nobody double-checked it and we built our whole discussion around it.

flores.emma10d ago

And here I thought my book club's biggest problem was someone bringing potato chips that were clearly stale since the last ice age. Sounds like you guys peer-reviewed that "study" with the same energy as a Facebook comment section. At least you got two meetings out of it, which is two more than that "study" deserved.

fiona_carr2610d ago

Ask yourself honestly, does it really matter if the stat was fake if it got everyone talking?