We remember stories - not stats

Our brain loves a good story.

Psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt says:

The human mind is a ‘story processor, not a logic processor.’

Psychologist Jerome Bruner’s research indicates that people remember facts and figures 20 times better when they are incorporated in stories than those facts just on their own.

Evidence?

Chip & Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick, conducted an experiment at Stanford University.

Students were given a minute each to make a speech. The topic was about crime statistics in the US – are they getting worse, or is there nothing to worry about?

Now, Stanford University students aren’t dumb. They’re smart, and they have the ability to deliver a decent speech in 60 seconds.

Listeners were asked to rate each of the speakers. How was their delivery? How persuasive were they?

Then the listeners were asked to write down each of the ideas they remembered from each speech.

Just 10 minutes after the speeches, the surprising thing was that they could hardly recall any of those ideas.

Now each speech on average contained 2.5 statistics.

Only one in 10 speeches told a story.

So, in 10 speeches, 25 statistics were told. And just one story.

And this is the powerful thing.

Only 5% of listeners remembered any individual statistic.

63% remember that one story.

We recall stories. We’re hard-wired to remember stories. Facts and figures, as important as they are, aren’t remembered anywhere near as well.

They are important though. They reflect your credibility. They help prove your point. But on their own, they don’t count for much.

Do you remember that slide show presentation in Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth? Gore is on stage pointing to the graph of the earth’s rising temperature.

It’s rising so much that he goes off stage, and returns in a scissor lift to elevate him to the top of the chart.

We all remember the scissor lift, don’t we? We remember that scene.

Do we remember what the chart represented? Nup.

Just think about it.

If you are on a podcast, or any platform – webinar, meeting, whatever – few will remember your statistics. But they will remember your stories, and how they feel about your stories.

Give them the facts and figures to show you know what you’re talking about. But tell them a story so that they remember why those stats important.