There may be some severe overlap between confirmation bias and fictional evidence generalization, but then again, the entire point of an anecdote, real or fake, is to establish something that you've already taken to be true and demonstrate it in a more accessible lens. I don't mean to say that the studies people run in addition to anecdotes have no weight, but, for the most part, when assessing a situation or a point, we tend to self-select the anecdotes most useful to whatever we originally believe, and those tend to stick with us more often than the exact studies which have actual weight in demonstrating the argument
I agree that often the point of an anecdote is to reinforce something you've taken to be true, from the teller's perspective. But from the listener's perspective, hearing an anecdote is often viewed as a way of exposing yourself to valid incoming evidence.
I, along with thousands of others, willfully embrace this bad mode of reasoning often when I read Yelp reviews, for example. I think, "I wonder if Restaurant X is good... hmm... let's see what contrived, one-off experiences that others found noteworthy enough to report..."
Of course, elements of...
Andrew Gelman has a post up today discussing a particularly illustrative instance of narrative fallacy involving the recent plagiarism discussion surrounding Karl Weick. I think there are also some interesting lessons in there about generalizing from fictional evidence.
In particular, Gelman says, "Setting aside [any] issues of plagiarism and rulebreaking, I argue that by hiding the source of the story and changing its form, Weick and his management-science audience are losing their ability to get anything out of it beyond empty confirmation."
I am wondering if anyone has explicitly looked into connections between generalizing from fictional evidence and confirmation bias. It sounds intuitively plausible that if you are going to manipulate fictional evidence for your purposes, you'll almost always come out believing the evidence has confirmed your existing beliefs. I would be highly interested in documented accounts where the opposite has happened and fictional evidence actually served as a correction factor.
For what it's worth, I personally enjoy a watered-down version of the moral that Weick attempts to manipulate from the story that's discussed in Gelman's post. My high school math teacher used to always say to us, "When you don't know what to do, do something." I think he said it because he was constantly pissed about questions left completely blank on his math exams, and wanted students to write down scribblings or ideas so he could at least give them some partial credit, but it has been more motivational than that for me.