Looking to Leave a Mark? Don't Just Spout Statistics, Tell Stories | HBS Working Knowledge, 20 JUN 2023

"...Using a series of controlled experiments, the researchers looked at how quickly the effect of different types of information on beliefs fades over time. While the effect of a story faded by roughly a third over the course of a single day, for a statistic, the temporal decay was a much more dramatic 73 percent. The difficulty in recall, in turn, stems not from loss of memory, per se. Instead, it has to do with conflicts with other similar memories that wind up blocking efforts to recall the specific piece of information or story, the study finds. Stories have a longer lifespan in memory not because of any different methods, compared to statistics, of being stored in the brain, but because they are more likely to include distinctive details or context that aid recall. By contrast, statistics and numbers, being abstract concepts, can be harder for the human mind to recall..."