Why Are Stories Stickier Than Statistics? (NSQ Ep. 10) - Freakonomics Freakonomics
"‘There's a ton of research from your field that shows that telling them to do the right thing often doesn't work. But there's also research that shows that telling them the rule itself, is much less effective than telling them a story.
So a lawyer for the US Department of Defense here is *something* Steve Epstein. His job is to brief supervisors and different government departments on the kind of things that their employees should and should not be doing. And he found that if he would tell them the rules and regs that people would read it and their eyes would glaze over. So instead, he created this book of true stories that he called the Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure. And it was nothing but a catalogue of epic screw ups perpetrated by federal workers. And his claim was that it was much more successful. You've mentioned something on the show before about the identifiable victim effect’
‘Yes, that's the work of my colleague at Wharton, Deborah Small, and then also our common friend, George Lowenstein. And that effect is in a nutshell, that if you have a victim of say, a crime or war, and you talk about that one victim’s story and who they were and what happened to them, that can be much more compelling and for example, get people to give more money to a cause, than a statistic about millions of people’
‘Right. Further evidence. The neuroscientist Jack Gallon at Berkeley, he put people in an fMRI machine to measure their brain activity. And he had them listen to stories. In fact, it was podcasts. And he found that podcasts, the storytelling stimulated much more brain activity than other types of information.’...
‘Kitty Genovese was a young woman who lived in Kew Gardens, Queens, who was murdered brutally horribly.’
‘And that's all true.’
‘That's all true. And the guy who killed his name is Winston Moseley, and I believe he died recently. And it was a particularly horrible crime. But the story that came to be famous and that worked its way into psychology textbooks had to do with the fact that there was an article written in the New York Times that described how 38 bystanders, people in the neighborhood had ignored her cries for help, and that no one had done anything or called the police. That was kind of the headline story.’
‘It's an unforgettable story.’
‘And that generated the idea of bystander apathy, which is if something terrible is happening, a lot of people don't want to get involved. And it turns out that if you pull apart the story of what actually happened that night, which is a little difficult to do, because this was in the 1960s, but we went back and in our second book, Superfreakonomics, we actually retold the story as well as we could, including the incentives for the reporters involved and the police involved. And it turns out that the story as rendered in the New York Times, and the story is kind of magnified throughout our collective memory and into the psychology textbooks, was just not right.
It wasn't that nobody shouted out and tried to stop it. It wasn't that nobody had called the police apparently, although that's contested. The fact was was that the murder was actually interrupted. The guy had attacked her and then was scared off, ran away, but then came back later and finished the crime. So it was a tragedy. But the general perception was that somehow 38 people were standing at their windows looking down and watching this happen and doing nothing. And that was very, very, very untrue. But the story was so compelling that it lived on... it was somewhere between a medium and a grotesque exaggeration.’
‘You're now talking about how the paradox may be that the stickiest of stories are least likely to be true.’…
‘In my field in social science, we're living through what is never a good thing, which is I think they're calling the replicability crisis or the replicability revolution. And it's the idea that there are these like, gee whiz findings that are just so surprising, like, oh, did you know that the color of the wall that you're looking at is gonna, you know, determine your mood and your behavior for the rest of the day? Things like that. And the more improbable and surprising, astonishing and therefore sticky the finding, one could argue like, not knowing anything else is actually the less likely it's true.’…
‘The other thing that I find so interesting about storytelling in the modern era, there's a lot of discussion about who quote owns the story and who's entitled to tell the story.’
‘Wait, what does that mean?’
‘If you're telling a story about let's say, accomplishment, or education, or crime or some kind of social factors. and it involves some sort of demographic groups. Maybe it's a gender group or an ethnic group or a racial group, whatever. You know, if you're describing that, and you're from outside of one of those groups, there's a question of, well, that's not really your story to describe. And I find that to be a really interesting dilemma.’...
‘Did you read The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck? Yeah, we all remember her middle initial, I don't know why. You loved it, right? You read it and you loved it, loved it. I did. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature. So I just finished this like a week or two ago, and I remember thinking, okay, she grew up largely in China, but she's a white woman from suburban Philadelphia really. And she wrote about my cultural tradition. It, by the way, as you probably also know, was made into an Academy Award winning film, where of course, largely the cast was white. None of this would play well, I think in 2020. And I think that's largely good.’
‘So that book was published in like the 1930s or something’...
‘Who does Pearl S Buck thinks she is to be writing the history or sharing that when it wasn't really quote unquote, hers?’"
Art and literature are no match for identity politics