Cherry-picking builds a false impression out of entirely true parts. Rather than fabricating anything, the manipulator selects only the facts, studies, quotes, or figures that support a predetermined conclusion and omits everything that would complicate or reverse it. Because each individual item survives fact-checking, the technique is far more durable than an outright lie — a skeptic who verifies the pieces can still be led to the wrong whole.
The engine is confirmation bias (T8.1) and the availability heuristic: an audience judges by the vivid evidence in front of them and rarely asks for the evidence that was left out. A supplement is sold on the one small trial that showed an effect while a dozen null results go unnamed; a policy record is defended with the good quarter and the bad decade is skipped; a chart begins in the single year that makes the line rise. This is the raw material of spin, pseudoscience, and disinformation, and it scales up into one-sided stories (T13.7) and, when contrary scraps are selected instead, into manufactured doubt (T13.18).
The defense is structural, not fact-by-fact. Because the deception lives in what is absent, verifying the present items cannot catch it. You have to reach for the full evidence base — base rates, systematic reviews, the widened timeframe, the strongest counter-case — and treat any presentation where all the evidence conveniently agrees as a signal to go looking for what was left on the cutting-room floor.