Advice For Your Dinner Party Stories: Keep It Familiar

NPR:

OK, I want you to think about the last time when you were at a dinner party and you were telling a story to your friends. Maybe you were talking about that exotic vacation you just got back from, maybe a brand new movie you saw that no one else had seen. Well, there’s some new social science research suggesting that you might be better off talking about experiences that your audience also has had. And to understand why this is, we are joined by NPR’s social science correspondent, Shankar Vedantam. Hey, Shankar.

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DAN GILBERT: They say, oh, there’s this guy. He’s a detective, and he lives in New York. And he’s got this girlfriend. And then they go to this place. And you’re just thinking, what, what, who? So we get lost very quickly when other people are speaking because most people are not particularly talented at telling stories.

GREENE: OK, I got totally confused when he was describing that movie. So is this a problem because I, as a listener, am sort of just totally left out?

VEDANTAM: That’s right. Now, it’s also possible that envy may be a part of this. If you tell me, David, that you’re off to Maui tomorrow, I might end up feeling envious of you. And so that earlier research has actually shown that one reason that stories about experiences we haven’t had are less satisfying to us is that they can leave us feeling left out. But what Gilbert and his colleagues Gus Cooney and Timothy Wilson are finding here is a different phenomenon. A common assumption that both storytellers and listeners are making turns out to be wrong.

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