It doesn’t matter if you’re crafting a pitch for tech investors, consumers, or election-season voters. If you want your target audience to remember your message the next day, tell a story.
That’s one of the findings of a new study by Thomas Graeber, assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. People are more likely to recall information over a longer period when it’s wrapped in an anecdote as opposed to statistics, according to the study, “Stories, Statistics and Memory.”
Graeber’s research validates what CEOs have long known: that a good story is more powerful than any statistic, chart, or slide deck. However, this is not necessarily because stories are more inspirational or persuasive. Rather, it is because of how our memory works: People are more likely to remember the story as time passes.
“If you think about it, it’s not that people communicate by numbers, but by natural language, by stories.”
The human mind’s love of stories over statistics can have serious implications that go beyond the question of the best approach for leaders. The preference for anecdote over stats can fuel misinformation on issues ranging from climate change to welfare reform, Graeber says.
“There is now a growing interest in understanding memory in economics,” Graeber says. “The question can be better understood as how people learn from qualitative information. If you think about it, it’s not that people communicate by numbers, but by natural language, by stories. A newspaper article is not just numbers.”
But that doesn’t mean there’s no role for statistics; arguments and pitches that rely on data and numbers can be more effective in some circumstances, notes the research, which Graeber conducted with Christopher Roth, a professor at the University of Cologne, and Florian Zimmermann, a professor at the University of Bonn.
Measuring memory
Using a series of controlled experiments, the researchers looked at how quickly the effect of different types of information on beliefs fades over time. While the effect of a story faded by roughly a third over the course of a single day, for a statistic, the temporal decay was a much more dramatic 73 percent.
The difficulty in recall, in turn, stems not from loss of memory, per se. Instead, it has to do with conflicts with other similar memories that wind up blocking efforts to recall the specific piece of information or story, the study finds.
“This is one of the first studies in economics that actually tries to study the role of memory and similarity in a controlled way.”
Stories have a longer lifespan in memory not because of any different methods, compared to statistics, of being stored in the brain, but because they are more likely to include distinctive details or context that aid recall.
By contrast, statistics and numbers, being abstract concepts, can be harder for the human mind to recall and are more likely to get tangled or blocked by irrelevant information.
“This is one of the first studies in economics that actually tries to study the role of memory and similarity in a controlled way,” Graeber says.
A story that people will remember
The findings have significant utility for business executives, public sector decision-makers, and anyone who must communicate and convince. Here’s what they should keep in mind:
Stories are resilient. A well-told story or anecdote leaves a lasting impression. A rule of thumb is that if you want your audience to remember a particular fact or piece of information for more than a day, then building a unique story around it is crucial, according to Graeber. Similarly, wrapping a story around a statistic could also extend its currency when it comes to the ability of the audience to recall it later.
Cues extend stories’ life. A story about dining will stick around longer if the story is placed in the context of restaurants, rather than the more general subject of shopping, for example, the study notes.
Statistics are better for immediate action. But, there is a scenario in which statistics actually perform better than stories. That is when the aim is to urge or prompt immediate action within hours or the same day.
“In the moment people receive information, they usually understand that statistics tend to be more informative than stories.”
In that case, a politician doing last-minute campaigning before an election, or a business executive seeking to boost sales or recruitment at a business event, might consider going with an eye-catching statistic over a story.
“In the moment people receive information, they usually understand that statistics tend to be more informative than stories,” Graeber says. “But after a day, stories are simply more memorable.”
Beware extreme stories
Still, the gap between storytelling and statistics also contains a cautionary tale, for by their very nature, stories can be unrepresentative of larger trends.
Prime examples of this pitfall include climate change denial, anti-vaccine information, or the way Ronald Reagan used a story about a so-called “welfare queen” to convince voters that fraud involving social programs was a much bigger problem than it was.
“Even when unrepresentative of reality at large,” stories “are more easily recalled than statistics,” the study notes. “This selective recall can give rise to misperceptions about reality as time passes.”
Looking ahead, Graeber and his fellow researchers see the potential for further research that would examine whether stories that are the most “extreme and surprising” are also the ones that get the most traction.
“If confirmed, this would point to possibly harmful implications of the story-statistic gap in memory,” the study notes.
“Harvard Business School is the graduate business school of Harvard University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It is consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world and offers a large full-time MBA program, management-related doctoral programs, and executive education programs.”
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