Matt Rocklage

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Sum:

◾️Confidence shows a U-shape with experience: experience decreases and then increases confidence
◾️Uncertainty leads people to switch to something different

Paper: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

We find consequences.

When confidence dips, consumers:

◾️Choose something different
◾️Take longer to repurchase
◾️Switch brands - and 50% never return to the same brand again

Novices start with inflated confidence (e.g., Dunning-Kruger).

Experience shows the domain's nuances, creating awareness of knowledge gaps.

Eventually, knowledge fills these gaps and confidence rebounds.

The pattern is consistent across domains, time periods, demographics, and a host of controls.

Why?

The conventional wisdom? Experience → confidence

Our findings across wine, beer, & cosmetics:

Initial experience DECREASES confidence. But with even more experience it rebounds

New paper accepted at Journal of Marketing Research! With Jonah Berger & Reihane Boghrati

We tracked 100k consumers across 4M reviews over 30 years using computational linguistics & machine learning

Key finding?: Confidence follows a U-shape🧵

Sum:

Across domains, stories with more and more dramatic reversals were more successful.

Want to tell a compelling story? Focus on your reversals.

This applies to everything from movies and novels to marketing campaigns and persuasion.

(end)

But would these results hold even for amateur stories?

We examined 1,200 GoFundMe fundraising pitches.

Stories with more reversals and larger reversals were more likely to reach their fundraising goal.

Narrative structure also matters for marketing and persuasion.

(8/9)

We then turned to 9,000 classic novels – from Little Women to Dracula.

Once again, novels with more reversals and larger reversals were more successful. These novels were downloaded more times, indicating enduring popularity.

(7/9)

Next we looked at 20,000 TV episodes.

Again, episodes with more reversals and larger reversals got higher IMDb ratings.

This held across genres and even within series: e.g., top-rated Simpsons episodes had more and larger reversals than other Simpsons episodes.

(6/9)

Movies with more reversals and larger reversals got higher IMDb star ratings.

This held true even when controlling for a host of alternative explanations (e.g., genre, budget).

(5/9)

We looked at two key factors:

1. Number: How many reversals?
2. Magnitude: How big were these shifts?

Question: Do more frequent and dramatic reversals lead to better stories?

(4/9)

Upward (purple) and downward (blue) trends from 10 Things I Hate About You movie.

We looked at 4,000 movie scripts.

We measured reversals based on theories of storytelling.

Theories suggest good stories reverse between positive and negative events.

We used NLP to track how positive or negative each story was as it unfolded, then marked the reversals.

(3/9)

We measured *narrative reversals* – key turning points:

- Romeo and Juliet: Love at first sight → Forbidden romance
- Iron Man 2: Villain cornering Pepper → Iron Man’s last-second rescue

Reversals are believed to be key to story success.

But do they really matter?

(2/9)

Narrative reversals and story success Combining computational linguistics and classical dramaturgy, we introduce a way to measure plot and predict narrative impact.

Research in Science Advances with Samsun Knight and Yakov Bart!

Why do some stories captivate us and some don’t?

We analyzed 30,000 stories across movies, TV, novels, and fundraising pitches to predict success.

Here’s what we found... (thread)

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...