The wet shoe wins first. On a courtroom floor, it carries texture, motion, and an implied witness; before an argument assembles its case, the mind has supplied one. That is not wisdom. It is cognitive efficiency, moving faster than statistics can.
A single story can hijack judgment. The availability heuristic gives easy-to-recall events a false air of frequency, while base-rate neglect lets a memorable exception crowd out the distribution that should govern a decision. Numbers demand comparison. Stories deliver a verdict. Their causal chain, even when thin, feels complete because narrative transportation turns attention into participation.
That imbalance is dangerous, not charming. In medicine, policy, and business, a tale can move resources toward the visible wound while quieter patterns keep doing damage. Data needs a body. Pair the aggregate with a representative case, state uncertainty plainly, and show the counterexamples the story omits. The remedy is not to scold readers for being human. It is to make evidence narratable without turning it into propaganda: show denominators, ranges, and rival explanations beside the case that captures the eye. Otherwise the memorable scene remains on the floor, polished by attention, while the larger truth waits outside the frame.
