The "man-who" syndrome

In Tom Friedman's NYT op-ed today, he states that:

Of all the pictures I saw from the Iraqi elections last weekend, my favorite was on nytimes.com: an Iraqi expatriate mother, voting in Michigan, holding up her son to let him stuff her ballot into the box. I loved that picture. Being able to freely cast a ballot for the candidate of your choice is still unusual for Iraqis and for that entire region. That mother seemed to be saying: When I was a child, I never got to vote. I want to live in a world where my child will always be able to.

He goes on to draw from the picture the conclusion that,

Iraq will be said to have a decent outcome not just if that young boy whose mother let him cast her ballot gets to vote one day himself.
...
I wish I could say that that was inevitable. It is not. But it is no longer unattainable, and I for one will keep rooting for it to happen.

Now, there is a wonderful little book that discusses - among other topics - "cognitive biases in the evaluation of evidence": The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, by Richards J. Heuer, Jr., published by the CIA and available in its entirety online: Psychology of Intelligence Analysis.

Among the biases discussed (Chapter 10):

The Vividness Criterion
The impact of information on the human mind is only imperfectly related to its true value as evidence. Specifically, information that is vivid, concrete, and personal has a greater impact on our thinking than pallid, abstract information that may actually have substantially greater value as evidence. For example:

Information that people perceive directly, that they hear with their own ears or see with their own eyes, is likely to have greater impact than information received secondhand that may have greater evidential value.

Case histories and anecdotes will have greater impact than more informative but abstract aggregate or statistical data.

...
A familiar form of this error is the single, vivid case that outweighs a much larger body of statistical evidence or conclusions reached by abstract reasoning.
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Nisbett and Ross label this the "man-who" syndrome and provide the following illustrations:

"But I know a man who smoked three packs of cigarettes a day and lived to be ninety-nine."

"I've never been to Turkey but just last month I met a man who had, and he found it . . ."

Mr. Friedman's hope for Iraq - derived from his interpretation of a single a memorable picture - is a great illustration of this bias in action.

For what it's worth, then Under-Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz based his argument for an Iraq-al Qaeda connection largely on a "man-who" fallacy:

“How many people here have heard of Abdul Rahman Yassin, if you’d raise your hand?” In a room of two dozen people, no more than two or three will raise their hands.

Wolfowitz notes the meagre tally, allows himself a slight smile, and then explains that Abdul Rahman Yassin was one of the men indicted for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six people and injured a thousand others. He remains a fugitive, the only one of the indicted perpetrators of that attack still at large.

Then Wolfowitz turns to the September 11th attacks. They were planned, he reminds his audience, by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Yousef, was a nephew and close associate of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “These are not separate events. They were the same target. They were the same people.” And Abdul Rahman Yassin, the fugitive from the first event? He fled to Iraq. “It would seem significant that one major figure in that event is still at large,” Wolfowitz says. “It would seem significant that he was harbored in Iraq by Iraqi intelligence for ten years.”
[The Believer: Paul Wolfowitz defends his war., Peter J. Boyer, The New Yorker, 1 Nov 2004]

A vivid - if somewhat convoluted - anecdote was critical to Wolfowitz's world-view... Was more influential, in fact, than the considered opinion of the U.S. intelligence community, and rafts of evidence suggesting that Saddam had nothing in common with al Qaeda.

A none-too-close inspection of other opinion-makers & policy-makers suggests that none of 'em is all that bright. Few have the analytical skills needed to evaluate data, or to distinguish 'vividness' from 'truth'.
How many have read Heuer's book?
Has Friedman???