If You Repeat An Anecdote in a Speech, Watch Out: Your Audience May Not Think You're 'Real'

I once heard a sermon -- at Easter, of all times! -- that had actually been presented by another pastor.

Essentially, it was a counterfeit sermon!

Now a new study says that something as simple as a repeated anecdote can make speakers less authentic, according to newswise.com.

The website reports that a mainstay of the political campaign trail is the heartfelt, homespun anecdote. It helps politicians build rapport with voters and establish themselves as appealing and relatable.

But new research from the University of Georgia Terry College of Business suggests those well-traveled anecdotes could be sabotaging that quest for connection, newswise explains.

The website points out that research conducted by Rosanna K. Smith, an assistant professor of marketing at UGA, and her co-author Rachel Gershon, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of California San Diego, shows that witnessing people repeat a story or anecdote leads their audience to view them as less authentic.

“We persistently found that people perceive otherwise identical performers or speakers to be less authentic after seeing them say the same thing twice,” the website quotes Smith.  “We examined this effect across a set of contexts — an entrepreneur pitching a business idea, a politician telling a moving story about health care, a tour guide giving a tour, a comedian telling a funny story, and a job candidate answering interview questions. Each time, participants who witnessed the performers repeat themselves judged the speaker as less authentic.”

How do people decide whether something is authentic, in this day and age of Photoshop and filtering and repurposed speeches and TV appearances?  

Authenticity is a quality increasingly sought after by consumers and voters. Scholars have proposed several drivers behind this desire for authenticity, including the overexposure to marketing content and the increased general distrust in institutions. In turn, people place an increasingly high premium on “realness” and authenticity in their brands and politicians.  

“Although we know that people often want their brands and leaders to be authentic, understanding how they assess and define this often complicated and multifaceted concept is a challenge,” explains Smith.

Smith and Gershon examined one facet of the public’s search for authenticity by focusing on how people assess the authenticity of repeated performances such as speeches and anecdotes.

"In their wide-ranging studies, Smith and Gershon asked participants to view different speakers: politicians giving stump speeches, entrepreneurs making elevator pitches, tour guides and others. In some instances, the speakers repeated the same stories, and in others, there was no repetition," newswise says.

"In each case, participants rated the speakers who repeated stories as less authentic. Intellectually, people know politicians and tour guides have to repeat themselves, but witnessing it left people with a negative impression," newswise quotes Smith.

The study found that people perceived performers to be inauthentic even when they knew it was required or even preferable that the performers repeat themselves. For instance, although people objectively know politicians often repeat stump speeches and that the job of tour guides is to repeat their tours, witnessing a repeated performance still leads people to perceive the speaker as less authentic.

“This thinking appears to be driven by people tending to assume that social interactions are, by default, unique — even interactions we rationally know are repeated,” Smith is quoted at the website. “When you listen to a politician give a moving speech, it seems like you are having a unique interaction or connection. So, when I see a YouTube video of them saying the same thing later, it feels like they fooled me and hence, I see them as less authentic. The interaction was not the unique connection I thought it was.

“The only time we found self-repetition did not reduce authenticity judgments was when the person openly acknowledged the repetition,” Smith concludes. “For instance, a speaker prefacing a story with ‘As I always say …’ was the only way we found that a speaker could maintain their authenticity with self-repetition.”