“What evidence would you need to see to change your mind?”
The honest answer to this question is usually: “I need a new story that’s more immediate, more vivid and most of all, more culturally aligned than the one I have now.”
It took humans 100,000 years to invent the scientific method. Before that, we lived our lives by stories, examples and the urgent.
We still do.
An anecdote is not evidence. But we often treat it that way.