The Science of Persuasive Storytelling

I got the chance to study voters' brains as they watched political campaign ads. The storytelling lessons I learned that day have stuck with me since.

The last time I watched an episode of NCIS, I was secretly undercover. My mission? Studying people’s brains.

It was early 2020, and I sat in a conference room at the downtown Manhattan headquarters of Neuro-Insight, one of the world’s leading neuromarketing firms. All around me, regular New Yorkers were being fitted with caps to study their neural activity. On the TV in front of us, an episode of NCIS was cued to play.

As the lights dimmed, it was a **record scratch*** moment. Yep, that’s me — an arts school grad who almost failed high school chemistry, casually commissioning a neuroscience experiment. How the fuck did I get here?

For years, I’d been obsessed with the science of storytelling. I spent years reporting on the work of neuroscientists like Dr. Paul Zak and wrote a best-selling book on the topic, The Storytelling Edge, with my writing partner, Shane Snow. And somehow, Shane and I had convinced Neuro-Insight to help us study voters’ brains.

While people thought they were there to watch NCIS, the main event was actually the commercial breaks, during which we’d slip in political ad campaigns for the leading Democratic presidential candidates.

The goal? To peek inside voters’ brains and see what messages and storytelling techniques literally changed their minds.

Most often, the difference between success and failure lies in our ability to tell a persuasive story — whether we’re running for office, fighting for budget at work, crafting a new marketing campaign, trying to sign a new client, or convincing our partner to go on a beach vacation for Christmas.

So, how can we do it better? I learned three key lessons that day that have stuck with me since.

1. Lead with a first-person story whenever possible

When we prepare to persuade our bosses and clients, we obsess over the facts, statistics, and key issues we think will make our case.

But none of that compares to the power of a first-person story.

In ads where candidates opened by talking about the issues, voters’ brains almost immediately tuned out and disengaged. But when candidates opened with their personal narrative, engagement spiked across the four key metrics in our study, measured by Neuro-Insight’s advanced Steady State Topography (SST) technology:

1. Engagement

2. Emotional intensity

3. Approach/withdraw (the positive or negative experience of that emotion)

4. Long-term memory encoding

Take this Elizabeth Warren ad, which was one of the most high-performing pieces of content we tested. It opens with Warren telling the story of growing up poor in Oklahoma, getting married at 19, and how she got a second chance at her dream thanks to a commuter college that only cost $50. As you’ll see in the video below, all four metrics spiked as she hits the story's happy climax, pulling voters in. While Warren ultimately didn’t win the 2020 primary, the success of this ad sheds light on why she was rocketing up the polls when we ran this study.

When you watch the video below, pay particular attention to the chart for Memory Encoding, which was the most important metric for our study since it correlates strongly with decision-making. Basically, it indicates you’re likely to remember a message that will affect your decision-making later on.

Hooking your audience with a personal story doesn’t just work in political ads; it’s also the key to engaging audiences online. Neuro-Insight’s research has found that social videos with an early story arc were 58% more likely to be viewed past 3 seconds, and the presence of people in the ad increased emotional intensity by 133%.

Personal narratives are the key to engaging and persuading people online, too. The Internet’s love affair with first-person writing started with the scrappy blogs of the 1990s and is basically the entire reason Substack exists. Unsurprisingly, neuroscience research confirms that first-person stories are much more engaging than third-person stories.

Whether you’re trying to become a thought leader in your field, build an audience for your business, or simply become a better manager, obsess over mining relatable stories and anecdotes that will forge a connection with your audience. If you’re a marketer trying to reach other marketers, ask: “What’s some real-real shit I’m going through that other marketers are, too?”

It’s also how you stand out in a world of AI slop. Sure, ChatGPT can write a passable blog post. But it will never have a personal story to tell.

2. If you want people to remember you and convert, optimize your content for ‘branding moments’

If you want to persuade people, they need to remember you and your message. After testing over 25,000 ads, Neuro-insight found one of the most effective ways to create memorable, high-converting content is to optimize for “branding moments.” These are moments when your audience has a high level of memory encoding — typically at the climax of a story — and you show a person or brand’s name/image on screen.

For example, see this breakdown of the high-performing Elizabeth Warren ad we tested. The ad strategically shows Warren’s face and/or name at three key moments where viewers are most engaged. These ‘branding moments’ scored in the top 90th percentile of all ads Neuro-Insight has tested, likely helping her rocket up the polls early in the 2020 primary.

Whether you’re running for president, selling chocolate bars, or trying to grow your paid newsletter subs, branding moments are one of the most effective strategies for creating content that converts. I did a deep dive on how marketers and creators can apply branding moments to their content earlier this year. Check it out here.

3. Show real people experiencing real emotion — and ditch the stock footage and Uncanny Valley AI avatars

The internet is polluted with bad stock photos and videos. (Or even worse, those terrifying faceless illustrations that haunt every SaaS website on earth. WHY?!)

And guess what? Stock imagery is kryptonite for engagement.

In the ads we tested, stock footage of people working, driving, etc. led people’s brains to disengage across all four key metrics we tested.

But when you show real people experiencing authentic emotion? Our brains love it.

For instance, see the Joe Biden ad below, which elicited the strongest emotional response of all the ads we tested. Shots of Biden meeting and hugging voters spiked strong positive emotions in voters’ brains.

We saw the same thing in the ads of candidates like Warren and Bernie Sanders; supporters joyfully cheering and crying at rallies drove high levels of neural engagement. Meanwhile, stock footage was the ultimate mood killer. It’s an easy crutch, but it doesn’t work. Stop using it.

The same advice likely applies to AI video as well.

Tools like OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Veo 2, and Runway promise to make it easy to generate AI replicas of people. But these Uncanny Valley avatars may not work very well — our brains have a sixth sense for phoniness. They can sniff out stock footage, and they can DEFINITELY tell when something is 99.9% human but not quite. Even as AI video has improved massively, our brains continue to reject the Uncanny Valley-ness of it all.

Instead, our brains are wired for stories that feel most human. Real stories from real people. Real people experiencing real emotion. If you want to craft persuasive messages and stories that change people’s minds, that’s the simple formula that breaks through.

If you liked this story, you might also like:

• AI and the Science of Creativity

• ‘Branding Moments’: The Secret Science of Memorable Content

• The Simple Shapes of Great Stories, According to Kurt Vonnegut

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Marketing advice of the week

Andrew Chen’s essay, Every marketing channel sucks right now, is probably the best piece of marketing advice I’ve read all year:

“Take risks with your brand. You can attract people with your brand by being polarizing. Say “this product is not for you, it’s for these other cooler people.” Or hit competitors directly in the face, in your marketing. Be aggressive. These are things that long-term employees of the world’s trustworthy brands can’t do, because they are being protective, and managing the downside. You need to do everything you can to stand out, because being ignored is the worst outcome for any marketing tactic.”

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Content advice of the week

Whenever I find myself losing hold of my writing voice and getting sucked into the trap of imitating others, I return to this advice from Ray Bradbury from his memoir, The Zen in the Art of Writing.

Whenever Bradbury felt “smothered” by the temptation to imitate his favorite writers, he’d make a list of random words and then use those words as a prompt to write a story. This free-association exercise unlocked another level of creativity (and helped him write one of his best short stories, The Lake):

“The lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull[…] in these words that I had simply flung forth on paper, trusting my subconscious to give bread, as it were, to the birds.”

Try it out as a journaling exercise Here’s a list you can use:

Typhoon

Asteroid

The lake house

Life raft

High heels

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Tool of the week

Note: This section is NOT sponsored. Just cool tools that I like.

Gamma

Gamma might just be the most useful AI tool I’ve ever used. It creates Powerpoints, social media carousels, and even entire websites in seconds. You can do a lot for free, and it’s saved me at least 20 hours the past two weeks.

I’m the best-selling author of The Storytelling Edge and a content nerd. Subscribe to this newsletter to get storytelling and audience-building strategies in your inbox each week.