Why stories are persuasive: Markus Huff at the Studium Generale

Why do stories often stick in our minds more than individual facts? And why is it so difficult to disprove narratives once they have become established, even when they are proven factually incorrect? Prof. Dr. Markus Huff, Deputy Director of the Leibniz Institute für Wissensmedien (IWM), addressed these questions in early July 2026 in a lecture as part of the Studium Generale programme at the University of Tübingen.

In a talk entitled ‘Why Stories Persuade – Narrative Cognition and Public Reality’, Huff explained, from a cognitive psychology perspective, how people take in and process stories. According to this view, information is not stored as isolated details. Rather, people link them together to form coherent mental models of events. These help them to understand and contextualise events, and to predict future developments.

When narratives are more enduring than individual facts

What makes understanding easier can also make dealing with disinformation more difficult: once a coherent narrative has become embedded in the memory, it often persists – even if individual elements of it are later corrected. Drawing on recent research, Huff demonstrated how narratives can thereby influence the perception of social reality.

The topic is closely linked to his research at the IWM. As head of the Perception and Action lab, Huff investigates how people select, mentally organise and link information to their prior knowledge in dynamic and sometimes contradictory digital knowledge environments. A particular focus is on narrative cognition and on the question of how people deal with misinformation and opposing views.

The lecture was part of the Studium Generale series ‘Media, Power and Humanity – How the digital media economy shapes our public sphere’.