Harvard study: When telling a story, aim for clarity over cutting edge
Telling stories — it’s a form of communication we’ve been perfecting for millennia. But according to new Harvard research, storytellers still need to work on striking a balance between old and new or risk losing their audience. A paper recently published in Psychological Science finds that although people most enjoy telling a new story, what listeners really seem to crave is something familiar. Speakers are eager to captivate their listeners and think a new story is the best way to entertain, the research notes. But the study also found that speakers telling original stories are often assessed a “novelty penalty” by listeners who find it hard to follow the new information. “It struck me that we always try to add these novel stories to conversations, and then it doesn’t go over as well as we think and then conversations kind of naturally drift back towards talking about familiar things or things that...