What To Do When Someone Angrily Challenges Your Data

If you have ever presented data to a room full of skeptical people, or been one of the skeptics yourself, you know the particular sort of outrage that a number on a slide can provoke. It seems to be directed at you, but it may actually be coming from an underlying insecurity that you know nothing about.

Outrage, when expressed against statistics, usually has an underlying cause. Which means the useful response is rarely to defend the number more loudly. It is to work out what the real objection is, and deal with that instead.