Editing Misuse of statistics (section)

===Overgeneralization===
[[Overgeneralization]] is a fallacy occurring when a statistic about a particular population is asserted to hold among members of a group for which the original population is not a representative sample.

For example, suppose 100% of apples are observed to be red in summer. The assertion "All apples are red" would be an instance of overgeneralization because the original statistic was true only of a specific subset of apples (those in summer), which is not expected to be representative of the population of apples as a whole.

A real-world example of the overgeneralization fallacy can be observed as an artifact of modern polling techniques, which prohibit calling cell phones for over-the-phone political polls. As young people are more likely than other demographic groups to lack a conventional "landline" phone, a telephone poll that exclusively surveys responders of calls landline phones, may cause the poll results to undersample the views of young people, if no other measures are taken to account for this skewing of the sampling.  Thus, a poll examining the voting preferences of young people using this technique may not be a perfectly accurate representation of young peoples' true voting preferences as a whole without overgeneralizing, because the sample used excludes young people that carry only cell phones, who may or may not have voting preferences that differ from the rest of the population.

Overgeneralization often occurs when information is passed through nontechnical sources, in particular mass media.