You call them contrarian anecdotes, I call them "sanity tests" and "smell tests."

NO, I do not have a study to support my position. I imagine one could be created and done, but one of the reasons you shouldn't ignore anecdotes is that studies cover a much tinier part of human experience than do anecdotes. Studies of any quality are EXPENSIVE.

Further, I doubt there is a study in the world that wasn't designed by someone with the intention of confirming their hypothesis, essentially confirming their anecdote. There is a bias to believing only studies, you are limiting yourself to a tiny fraction of human knowledge, and to ideas which were able to garner the funding needed to study them.

Studies are expensive, but they are worth it, I hardly suggest ignoring them in favor of anecdotes. But anecdotes, intuitions, beliefs, these are all what LEAD the people with the resources to study particular hypotheses. One can not gain knowledge optimally without participating in this process, without comparing the anecdotes against the studies to see if the studies really are sufficient to support their conclusions, or whether possibly the conclusions drawn from the studies are too broad, not constrained enough by the richness of the other not-yet-tested hypotheses out there?

As to whether "people" (whoever that means) tend to overweight anecdotes, that is worth considering. And worth correcting in oneself and others if you believe it is happening. But what people? Am I one of those people that overweights anecdotes? I have a PhD in physics, I'm in a sense TRAINED to consider anecdotes against studies, to sift through intuitions to attempt to determine which tiny fraction of them that I can afford to test I will gain the most from testing.

Should people with the proper credentials be allowed to see anecdotes, but have them hidden from the masses? This would be a recipe for authoritarianism, another famous human bias we would do well to avoid. It is also a strawman set up by me, not the OP, so don't pay too much heed.

But the solution is intelligent discussion and consideration.

And I probably never will buy a Toyota again, not because of someone else's anecdote but because of my own deplorable experience with Toyota's lack of response to the squeaky brakes on my 1999 Sienna. I don't need to pay a premium for reputation if I'm going to get treated like a sucker.