Cherry Picking

The term derives from fruit harvesting—selecting only the ripest cherries—and gained traction in U.S. English during the 1950s for selective choice. Irving M. Copi explicitly classified it as an informal fallacy in his 1953 Introduction to Logic, defining it as deliberate omission of evidence weakening a conclusion. The term became prominent in statistics and empirical research as a recognized form of research bias violating random sampling principles.