Stories are more memorable than stats: Fact or fiction?
Jerome Bruner may never have proven that “stories are 22 times more powerful than facts alone,” but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
1
Gerard’s Crab
“When Gerard was six years old, the only thing he really wanted was a pet. By sheer coincidence, that year Gerard’s teacher announced a field trip to Baltimore Harbor, two hours by bus.
On the day of the trip, it was sunny, Gerard remembered 40 years later. The harbor air smelled like salty shoes. Along the harbor walk, there were fishmongers in slick, oil-colored smocks with the fruits of the ocean laid out on ice chips. There were candy shops and hat shops and souvenir shops with Baltimore Aquarium-themed pens and snow globes and backscratchers.
The rest of the class picked up a souvenir. Gerard decided he would bring a saltwater blue crab home as a pet. He asked his teacher. She approved. Gerard had a fishmonger wrap his crab up in a brown paper bag. He held the bag the whole way back to his house in Stratford Landing. When the bus pulled back into the school parking lot, Gerard ran all the way home.
Gerard’s mother was waiting for him at the landing. He showed her the bag with his crab. He doesn’t remember the look on her face. He ran upstairs to the kitchen and filled the kitchen sink with lukewarm water, added some cooking salt, and let the crab loose.
The crab sank to the very bottom of the stainless steel basin like an unmoored boat propeller. It didn’t move. It didn’t even send out a final bubble. The crab was stone cold dead.”
Fact: 100% of saltwater crabs die out of the water. Though Gerard’s takeaway was: never trust teachers. I know because the story is mine. What will you remember about my story?
There is a famous quote attributed to cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner, “People remember stories 22 times better than facts alone.” It’s a nice fact, relatively easy to remember, and intuitive. Of course, people remember stories better than facts.
The problem is, as far as I’m aware, Dr. Bruner never said it.
2
Michaelangelo Buonarroti
Michaelangelo Buonarroti was born in Caprese, Italy, in 1475. I’ve stored that year in my head for over two decades, not because the number 1475 means anything to me, but because 1475 — in my mind — is in between Giotto (the great medieval master) and Titian (the great Venetian master). Michelangelo ties the two movements together. That relationship has significance for me.
The fact that Jerome Bruner’s phantom study doesn’t seem to exist doesn’t stop marketing gurus, professional storytellers, and life coaches the world over from quoting it. Google it. An exact search of “people remember stories 22 times better” pulls up over 194 matches. In other forms, I estimate (but don’t quote me), the phrase may appear on thousands of web pages. Like the chameleon wording of the statistic itself, its appearances are multicolored and fascinating.
Larry Ferlazzo, of Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day, drops it in passing: “I found that quote in a post by Shawn Callahan and subsequently learned it comes from Bruner’s book, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds.”¹ It doesn’t, but bookmark that reference.
It also appears in Forbes, and in an Inc. article. Though instead of giving Bruner credit, Inc. reattributes the quote to Stanford social psychologist Jennifer Aaker. Bookmark that name, too.
You can even find the Bruner quote in the Atlantic, of all places, in an article titled The Psychological Comforts of Storytelling: Why, throughout human history, have people been so drawn to fiction? by Cody C. Delistraty, which again references Aaker as the authority on the 22-times-more-powerful story.²
Could the quote belong to Aaker then? More seriously: don’t they have fact checkers at the Atlantic?
3
Zell am See
407,800 Americans died in World War II.³ Between 8,800,000 and 11,400,000 Russians died in World II.⁴ These facts are impressive, heart-wrenching, almost impossible to fathom. I will likely forget them.
Twenty men from the 101st Airborne, a.k.a. the Screaming Eagles — drunk on looted wine and booze, many suffering from extreme PTSD — died in driving accidents in just six weeks in Austria after the Germans surrendered on May 8th, 1945, with an additional 100 injured. I learned this reading Stephen Ambrose’s excellent book about the 101st Airborne, Band of Brothers. It’s on page 314, if you’re curious.
I will probably forget this statistic one day, too, even though it is, in its own way, as difficult to fathom as nine million Russian war casualties or a give-or-take figure that spans almost four million lives.
But there is a story in Ambrose’s book I have never forgotten. It’s about a soldier who survived the horrors of war with distinction only to get his brains blown out by a drunk, joyriding G.I. at a friendly checkpoint in the mountains around Zell Am See just weeks after the German capitulation. Sergeant “Chuck” Grant was technically not one of the road fatalities because he wasn’t driving when he was shot, and he survived, somehow, with the emergency aid of a German brain surgeon.
I’ll remember the irony of those details, and possibly the weirdness of so many deadly accidents happening in what was technically peacetime, because they are embedded in a tragic story. The ratio of American deaths to Russian deaths will also likely stick to some nook of my brain because it’s an interrelation and brains use interrelations as crutches to make sense out of facts.
But, as I said, the numbers themselves — those mountains of dead American and Soviet bodies — will likely fade from memory.
The oft-quoted Dr. Aaker of Stanford showcases the Bruner quote in her lecture Harnessing the Power of Stories. In fact, they’re the first words out of her mouth.⁵
She doesn’t mention that the research wasn’t hers, possibly because she believes that the study has been quoted so many times by now, in so many places, that everyone is aware of its provenance, or that we’ve collectively repeated it so many times the words have become scientific truth, or better, folk wisdom.
That fact that someone actually said them, let alone proved them, in other words, no longer even matters.
Is it the place to ask why a fact is being used as evidence to prove that facts don’t matter or how a Stanford scholar with a Ph.D. hasn’t caught on to the paradox?
That, by the way, is called “praeteritio,” an ancient Roman rhetorical technique for saying something without saying it. I once used this technique in a newspaper article about a loud, bullying hotelier and I got sued for £10,000. Which will you remember: the praeteritio, the sum, or the story?
4
Salty Broth
“We broke up on Friday. But on Saturday you wanted to go for a walk. We left our apartment and headed west, over the Manhattan Bridge. I wanted wonton soup and by accident we ended up at Noodle Village, the site of an early date. As we drank salty, shrimpy broth, we sobbed, alarming Chinatown’s tourists. Being able to mourn our love together, I realized, is love.”
This lovely story is by Hannah Beattie. It appears in Tiny Love, a love column in the New York Times featuring “reader-submitted stories of no more than 100 words.”⁶ Do you like it? Or does this stat from Marie Claire, via Psychology Today, phrase it better? “A breakup isn’t always the end of the road. In fact, a hefty 60 percent of couples report getting back together again.”⁷
Do they? Heftily? According to Vennum et al, they do.⁸ Did Hannah get back together with her lover? Possibly. But Hannah’s unexpected observation — her epiphany — framed by wonton soup, packs a wallop. It etches itself in your brain in a way the accompanying picture and the statistic can’t hope to.
I believe Jerome Bruner and Jennifer Aaker would probably agree. As for their quote, maybe it’s time to hang it up, as Hari Patience Davies — storytelling coach, digital consultant and speaker — suggests.⁹
Davies says she’s actually read Bruner’s book, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, “from cover to cover” (I’m assuming, unlike the others, she actually has) and can’t find any reference to Bruner’s famous words. She concedes that the quote may have come from another of Bruner’s books or lectures. Maybe it has. The alternative — that it is Aaker’s original research — is implausible.
In either case, Davies definitely has a way with search engine optimization (SEO). Her inconclusive exposé garnered her second position in Google’s search results for the world’s most popular (apocryphal) quote on the power of stories. Whenever someone googles Bruner’s ghost study, her name will pop up.
Interestingly, Davies quotes two actual university studies that suggest that storytelling does, in fact, make statistics more memorable, by up to 12 times. But do the numbers really matter? I really don’t think so.
There’s no doubt that audiences remember stories, if by stories we mean narratives that tie events, details, and feelings together in meaningful ways, whether on a website or blog, in a data visualization, video script, TV series or novel.
There’s just too much “evidence” from Gilgamesh on up to Hannah Beattie to support this claim.
Likewise, there’s no doubt that, if you’re a business owner, communicating with customers through stories is the key to planting your name in their heads more lastingly and earning you more and deeper engagement.
If these stories haven’t convinced you, I understand. A boy and his pet crab, a woman and her wonton soup, isn’t a business with a finite advertising budget to reach an audience vital to its existence. In that case, take a look at this brand story.
It shows a business finding its voice and the narrative it wanted to tell. While I have used facts in places — a 25% higher newsletter open rate is significant — you’ll see that the true value of this company case study is in the story I’ve told to tie its unique vision and services together.
Sources
1. Intriguingly, Larry Ferlazzo hedges a little in his url (“about 22 times as memorable”). Here’s Ferlazzo’s post on Bruner in full.
2. Read The Psychological Comforts of Storytelling by Codey Delistraty in the Atlantic.
3. Clodfelter, Micheal (2002). Warfare and Armed Conflicts — A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1500–2000 (2nd ed.). McFarland & Co. p. 582. ISBN 0–7864–1204–6.
4. G. F. Krivosheyev (1993) “Soviet Armed Forces Losses in Wars, Combat Operations and Military Conflicts: A Statistical Study.” Military Publishing House Moscow. (Translated by U.S. government.) p.121 Retrieved April 27, 2022.
5. Watch Aaker’s lecture Harnessing the Power of Stories on YouTube.
6. Tiny Love is worth a gander.
7. Why Get Back with an Ex may not be worth a gander.
8. Find Vennum’s stats in Psychology Today.
9. Davies’ article is great and deserves a read: The Case of the Missing Author: Just Where Did That Claim That Stories Are 22 Times More Memorable Than Facts Come From
