How to Lie with Statistics is a book written by Darrell Huff in 1954, presenting an introduction to statistics for the general reader. Not a statistician, Huff was a journalist who wrote many how-to articles as a freelancer.

How to Lie with Statistics

Cover of the first edition
Author	Darrell Huff
Illustrator	Irving Geis
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Statistics Social science
Publisher	W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date	1954
Media type	Print
Pages	142
ISBN	0-393-31072-8
Dewey Decimal	311.2
LC Class	HA29 .H82
Text	How to Lie with Statistics at Internet Archive

The book is a brief, breezy illustrated volume outlining the misuse of statistics and errors in the interpretation of statistics, and how errors create incorrect conclusions.

In the 1960s and 1970s, it became a standard textbook introduction to the subject of statistics for many college students. It has become one of the best-selling statistics books in history, with over one and a half million copies sold in the English-language edition.^[1] It has also been widely translated.

Themes of the book include "Correlation does not imply causation" and "Using random sampling." It also shows how statistical graphs can be used to distort reality. For example, by truncating the bottom of a line or bar chart so that differences seem larger than they are. Or, by representing one-dimensional quantities on a pictogram by two- or three-dimensional objects to compare their sizes so that the reader forgets that the images do not scale the same way the quantities do.

The original edition contained illustrations by artist Irving Geis. In a UK edition, Geis' illustrations were replaced by cartoons by Mel Calman.