Storytelling: The Power of Narratives

Sell Stories to Sell Anything?

As an engineer, it took me a very long time to understand an important fact: when trying to convince people, data and logic are far less effective than telling the right stories. And to convince you of that fact, I’m going to tell a few stories here.

If you don’t like reading, this is available as a YouTube video:

Stealing Mangoes and Not Getting Punished

This is a story from my childhood. I lived in a neighbourhood that had lots of trees, including mangoes, guavas, jamuns, and more. All of us children loved climbing those trees, plucking the fruits and eating them. But this was made difficult by the fact that each tree was in the backyard of some house, so you weren’t allowed to pluck any of the fruits without the permission of the person living there, and in most cases, we did not have permission. Which obviously meant that the fruits we liked the most were the ones we were forbidden from taking. We regularly stole fruits of forbidden trees and every once in a while got caught and punished.

One of the most memorable incidents from my childhood is my friend Karthik who took one such fruit and got caught. But instead of trying to run away, or apologize, Karthik looked the lady in the eye and said, “Oh Aunty! This is for a good cause. We kids are taking one mango from each tree in the neighbourhood and we will make a community pickle out of this.” Not only did Karthik not get any punishment, but he also got to keep the mango. Which, I’m assuming Karthik ate, but not in front of the aunty.

Selling Trash for $3600

For how much can you sell an unused box of birthday candles? Or a bunch of lost keys? Or a little, plastic Russian doll with a big, cloth moustache that's mounted on a little piece of wood. I’ll give you a hint: most of these items were bought from a thrift store and the average price was around $1. (The plastic doll was expensive, at $3.)

In 2009, journalists Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn decided to find out exactly how much of an effect the right story can have on the value of an object. So they conducted a fascinating experiment. They bought a hundred such items for a total price of $128.74. They called each of these items “significant objects”. But, as you can clearly tell, they were junk. Here comes the good part: because they were journalists, they were friends with a large number of writers and novelists. So they asked each writer to concoct a (fake) backstory with each item. And then the item was posted for sale on on eBay with that backstory.

The items, which cost a total of $128.74, sold for a total of $3612.15. That’s a profit of 2705%.

Let’s look at some of the stories:

Original price $1. Sold for: $104.50.

This Pink Horse which cost $1 was given a heartbreaking backstory of a poor woman with two daughters (both of whom died in the story). It sold for $104.50. You can read the full story here.

Original price 99 cents. Sold for: $62.95.

This ceramic horse, which cost just 99 cents sold for $62.95. Because it was given a racy backstory involving the “sellers” parents and how they met during an x-rated college ragging incident involving this horse. Check out the full story.

You can read the full story of this experiment and even check out their website which has lots of details and even more experiments.

The greatest salespeople don’t sell product features, they sell stories. Nike doesn’t sell shoes, it sells stories of athletes overcoming challenges and pushing their limits. They’ve created a narrative of achievement and perseverance, not just comfort or performance, and when you buy a Nike, you’re buying into that story. When Steve Jobs needed to convince John Sculley, the then CEO of Pepsi, to take over as CEO of Apple, he asked Sculley, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or come with me and change the world?” He essentially told Sculley to choose between the two different stories that could told about his life (and one of those stories was clearly better.)

Here Comes the Theory…

There are many more such fascinating stories showing the power of stories but I’m too much of a nerd, so I’m going to switch to theory.

Why is storytelling so powerful?

The primary reason is that stories appeal to the System 1 in our brain while facts and logic appeal to System 2. If you don’t understand what that sentence means, read my article on System 1 and System 2 and their strengths and weaknesses (or if you don’t like reading, there’s the video or podcast). I’d say this is important enough that you should read that first and then come back here to continue.

As you know, System 1, the instinctive, emotional, subconscious part of your brain is really in charge of most of your decisions, and System 2, the logical, rational, thinking brain just comes up with fake reasons to support the instinctive, emotional decisions already taken by System 1. And System 1, which has evolved over billions of years does not understand logic or complex chains of reasoning or data and statistics and probability. It understands emotions, people and their relationships and their basic motivations, and simple patterns. And stories supply the latter. Which is why stories override data in most cases.

Even when statistics and probability did not exist, in the African Savannah, stories were important. There is research showing that even in tribes of hunter-gatherers, storytellers have more importance and better status than people with important skills. Specifically storytelling skills are more sought after than fishing and hunting skills or medicinal knowledge. Why might this be true? One theory is that tribes with better storytellers have more cooperation and for humans the most important skill is cooperation! In fact, in Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari argues that everything in the modern is based on stories: religion is a story, a nation is a story, and money is a story, laws are a story, and every company is a story.

The greatest teachers are great storytellers. For example Adam Smith. Even I’ve noticed that when I teach, students remember the stories I give as examples, and forget most of everything else I teach. The best entrepreneurs are storytellers—often, the most important skill investors look for in startup founders before investing is the ability to tell stories. One of the most important skills for a magician is the story woven around the magic trick. Stories are so important that if there is a collection of unrelated facts with no story attached to them, our brain works hard to find a story to link them together. That explains astrology, tabloids, the gossip culture, and much more. As my friend Dr. Bhooshan Shukla points out apophenia—the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things—explains so much of what’s happening in the world (and what’s wrong with it).

So, Should We Give Up On Data and Logic?

Stories can be used to convince people of anything—good things and bad things, true facts and falsehoods. Politicians, salespersons, scammers, and astrologers all know this and (mis-)use it.

What we—the people who are in team rationality, logic, data, and science—need to do is adopt the same weapons and use them for good. Science-based education puts too much emphasis on data and logic. We need to learn to combine the power of narrative with the power of data. As economist Niranjan Rajadhyaksha points out, statistics and data work in the short-term, but in the long-term, stories win. Which means that you should use data if you expect your listeners to take action immediately. But if there is going to be a delay before they have to act, you are better off using a story. System 2 forgets data from a rational argument quickly while System 1 remembers the emotions from a story for a long time.

Take-Home Message

Learn to get better at telling stories. When trying to convince someone, use stories not data. When giving a talk/presentation, tell stories—put the data in a document that you mail them afterwards. And when you’re on the receiving end of a story, remember it is a double-edged weapon—check if there are alternative stories to ensure that you’re not being scammed by your System 1.

I’ll leave you with this cartoon: