Embellish  the  Details!

Listening to someone recount an unbelievable experience or sharing one’s own can draw people closer to one another. Does it matter whether the telling is completely accurate? Recent studies suggest that shared stories can warm listeners up to storytellers even when there is reason to think an account is somewhat embellished.

In one study, participants read stories by a fictional person, Pat, about experiences such as witnessing an argument or having a car break down. The versions Pat shared were either truthful, exaggerated, or contained outright lies. When asked to imagine that they were hearing the story as one of Pat’s friends, participants who had read the exaggerated version (“My car swerved on the road and I lost control…”), including those informed of what actually happened, rated the story as higher quality than did participants who read a truthful account. And unlike those who read the blatantly dishonest version (“I crashed into another car…”), people who read the exaggerated version felt roughly as close to Pat as those who read the honest one.

Two experiments in which participants watched a video and then heard a storyteller describe the events to them found that they tended to feel closer to someone who exaggerated rather than aimed for accuracy.

“The function of autobiographical memory is to share who you are as a person, and exaggeration can help with that,” says study co-author Holly Cole, a psychologist at Wesleyan College in Georgia. If embellishing the details of a story can be socially useful, however, pushing it too far can backfire. “Lying could make listeners feel less close to the storyteller.”

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