Speakers make or break their speeches – and careers – based on the strength of their stories and their command of the facts in the area of their expertise.
Most often, those speeches are best understood as acts of persuasion. A motivational speech is an act of persuasion, obviously: the speaker tries to get the audience on its feet and excited about becoming new people in one way or another. Right now, here in the US, we’re already deep into the race to become the next President, with over 20 Democratic candidates and now 3 Republicans all trying to persuade us that they are best suited to be President for the next four years beginning in January 2021. (If that seems like a long way off to be getting excited already, you’re right.) Less obviously, speeches on other topics are acts of persuasion, too – persuasion about a POV or the rightness of a cause or the need for action in one sphere or another.
The general operating assumption, then, is that stories help in the act of persuasion, by being emotional and memorable, whereas facts persuade us as proof points.
So, how do you weight the two forms of rhetorical persuasion, stories and facts? Is there a way to know when to use one or another? Most speakers just pack as many of both in as they can, time permitting. The more stories, especially, the better. Too many facts can make a speech overwhelming, or boring, but you can’t possibly overdo the stories, right?
Along comes a new study that finds that there is a situation under which stories actually detract from the persuasiveness of a speech. And that is when the facts are strong.
When the facts are strong, it turns out to be more persuasive to let them stand on their own. Stories in part disrupt our ability to evaluate facts – they distract us, in effect. So they mask strong facts and make the argument overall less persuasive.
When the facts are weak, on the other hand, it’s better to add the story, distract the listeners, and get them to focus on the emotions and other details. That will mask the weakness of the facts and make them appear stronger than they are. Ms Rebecca Krause, one of the authors of the study, says, “Stories persuade, at least in part, by disrupting the ability to evaluate facts, rather than just biasing a person to think positively.”
It’s not the case, then, that the more stories you have, the better for your argument. If you’ve got a strong case to make via your facts, then let them stand on their own and prove your rightness. It’s only when your facts are weak that you need to bring in stories to bolster your argument.
But there’s a further wrinkle. Stories still are widely perceived to be more memorable than facts, and there’s lots of good reasons for this to be so. Our memories are stronger or weaker depending on the strength of the emotions we tie them to, and stories are much more likely to have emotions attached than mere facts. A story of a horrific accident is far more vivid than your last cup of coffee, because of the tragic emotions associated with the accident. Similarly, health scares and other life-and-death moments stick with us far more powerfully than routine meetings or even pronouncements from the top brass in your company.
There may well be times, then, when you’re forced to choose between being memorable or being persuasive – a choice no speaker wants to make. In that case, go with memorability, even if it hurts a little to be thought less persuasive, because that is the deep purpose of virtually every speech ever given. After all, they won’t be persuaded if they can’t remember it.
Thank you. A memorable article
Thanks, Jon!
Fascinating! Thanks for repeatedly sharing counter-intuitive and thought-provoking research.
I also have a request: On your blog, it’s extremely hard to spot dark blue links among the dark grey text. Please consider updating your template so links are obvious. Thanks!
Thanks, Craig — we will look into the link thing.
Hi Nick,
Thoughtful post. But I disagree.
First, facts or stories presents a false choice — great presenters use both.
The best stories are backed up by facts — facts from authorities that the audience trusts.
That’s the rub, since even the most-believed authority figures are believed by only 2 out of 3 people (says the Edelman Trust Barometer).
Stories spark emotion, get remembered and lead to action.
Facts get forgotten.
George Stenitzer
Thanks, George, and yes, speakers need to both deploy facts and tell stories. That was the point of the post. The working assumption that I was testing was, are stories always better than mere facts? And the new research was interesting precisely because it suggested a situation under which a strong fact might be more persuasive than a story. But, as I said at the end, memorability is even more important, and there stories trump facts every time.
Interesting article, yet I agree with George in that you seemed to layout a false choice between story and fact. Even at the end, you seem to lay out a false choice between “memorable” and “persuasive”, as if the two were diametrically opposed.
This is curious to me.
Granted, I was unable to bring up the study you use as support stating, facts were more persuasive than stories. In our current political climate, I am not sure that statement could be supported.
If we consider Aristotle’s treatise on persuasion, both are equally important for persuasion (including the third element, credibility of the speaker/storyteller). And in my own observation, there is a vast number of people that would find story more persuasive, if for no other reason than the facts are not as comprehensible to them; or simply the story is more compelling.
This is why we must often cloak our facts in story, not just to be memorable, but to be understood.
Thank you for stimulating the discussion.
Diana
Thanks, Diana, for your comments. The link to the study is in the post, all you had to do was click on it, but here it is again. (http://spsp.org/news-center/press-releases/krause-rucker-stories-persuasion).
You misread my post in an interesting way. I wasn’t suggesting a “false choice,” but rather asking a “what if?” For some reason, readers seem to find that hard to understand. The question was, are there conditions under which audiences might find stories or facts more persuasive? And that’s what the study looked at. Of course most speeches do both. And of course we all know — and have abundant evidence to support the conclusion that — under most conditions stories are more memorable than facts. That was the starting point, the given. And that’s why the study was interesting — it was pointing to a condition or situation where facts might prove more persuasive (note, not more memorable, but rather more persuasive).
Thank you!
This research was very helpful in understanding what was being measured and how conclusions were derived. I simply could not open the link imbedded in the article; perhaps due to me currently being abroad. I appreciate your response.
I teach public speaking at a Tier I University and emphasize the importance of storytelling in my advanced classes. This discussion is very illuminating and can impact what I bring into the classroom. Thank you for taking the time to respond.
Hi, Diana — glad you were able to get through to the research and apply it to your classrooms. We all believe in the power of storytelling; it’s good to be aware of other options, studies, points of view, and so on so that we don’t get dogmatic in our views.