Sources
We checked every figure and finding in this section against the sources below on 27 October 2026.
01 · INSTINCT
Anthropologist Polly Wiessner compared 174 day and night conversations among Ju/'hoan (!Kung) hunter-gatherers in southern Africa. By day, 6% of conversations were stories. By firelight at night, 81% involved stories. PNAS, September 2014.
02 · CONNECTION
dentsu's Sports Docuseries report, October 2025: three-quarters of viewers said sports docuseries make them feel closer to athletes, and four in ten people worldwide had watched one in the past month.
03 · AUTHENTICITY
The Harris Poll with the 4As and Infillion, presented at Cannes Lions in June 2026: 6,172 adults in eight countries, including the UK. 78% said AI makes ads feel less authentic, 73% would be less likely to trust an ad they suspected AI had made, and 63% would be less likely to buy from a brand that uses AI-generated ads.
04 · ORIGINALITY
Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauser had about 300 people write short stories, some with ideas from AI, and 600 others judge them. Stories written with AI ideas were rated more creative, better written and more enjoyable, especially from less creative writers, but they were more similar to each other. Science Advances, 2024.
05 · AUTHENTICITY
Haoran Chu and Sixiao Liu ran three pre-registered experiments. Labelling a story as AI-written consistently made readers less absorbed in it and more inclined to argue with it, whoever had actually written it. Journal of Communication, 2024.
06 · CONNECTION
Morning Consult surveyed 20,589 sports fans in 12 countries, including the UK, for IBM in June 2026. Of fans who follow sports creators, 74% said storytelling is very or somewhat important to how they connect with sport, and 24% said it's how they connect emotionally with teams and players.
07 · AUTHENTICITY
Getty Images VisualGPS research, April 2024, covering 25 countries: 98% agreed that authentic images and videos are pivotal in establishing trust, and almost 90% want to know whether an image was made with AI.
08 · MEMORY
In a Stanford class exercise described in Chip and Dan Heath's Made to Stick (2007), students gave one-minute speeches using 2.5 statistics on average. Asked to recall them afterwards, 63% remembered the stories; 5% remembered any single statistic.
09 · INSTINCT
UCL researchers asked nearly 300 Agta hunter-gatherers in the Philippines, across 18 camps, who they would most like to live with. Skilled storytellers were nearly twice as likely to be chosen and had on average 0.53 more children, and camps with more of them cooperated more. Nature Communications, December 2017.
10 · REACH
Ofcom's Media Nations 2026 report, July 2026: average daily YouTube viewing on UK TV sets rose from 9 minutes per person in 2022 to 19 minutes in 2025. Across all devices at home it was 41 minutes a day.
