How to lie with statistics

A great introduction to using statistics, and a fantastic review for anyone well-versed in it.

Author's name: Darrell Hough

This book offers an introduction to statistics for the general reader. Hough was a journalist, not a statistician, and wrote many "how-to" articles as a freelance writer. The book is a concise, illustrated volume that demonstrates the misuse of statistics and errors in their interpretation, and how these errors can lead to incorrect conclusions. In the 1960s and 70s, it became a standard introductory text to statistics for many university students and one of the best-selling statistics books in history, with over 1.5 million copies sold in English. It has also been widely translated. Topics covered include "correlation does not imply causation" and "the use of random sampling." It also illustrates how statistical graphs can be used to distort reality; for example, by cropping the bottom of a line or bar chart, differences will appear larger than they are, or by representing one-dimensional quantities on a diagram with two or three-dimensional objects to compare their sizes, causing the reader to forget that images are not measured in the same way as quantities.