Expertise Shapes the Multidimensional Perception of Stories

Stories have the power to connect people, evoke memories, and spark imagination. People can appreciate stories on multiple dimensions, but many previous studies have focused narrowly on the evaluation of story creativity, relying on experts’ ratings and high inter-rater reliability, overlooking meaningful differences between ratings across populations and the opportunity to assess other narrative dimensions (e.g., cohesiveness). Moreover, although some quantitative linguistic features are predictive of story creativity ratings, it is unclear how those features drive a broader range of narrative qualities and individual differences in human ratings. Here, we addressed these limitations by examining how expertise shapes ratings of five dimensions of story quality (creativity, imagination, novelty, complexity, cohesiveness) and analyzing how ratings are influenced by four linguistic feature categories (language productivity, lexical predictability, semantic similarity, and content composition). Online storytellers improvised spoken stories, transcripts of which (N=108) were rated by both novices (N=304) and creative writing/storytelling experts (N=15) on the five story dimensions and analyzed using the linguistic feature categories above. Overall, experts and novices provided similar average ratings, and their rating spaces both showed two distinct underlying principal components–essentially, creativity and cohesiveness–which were, in turn, predicted by distinct linguistic features. Notably, experts perceived the five dimensions as more differentiated, and their ratings were less driven by linguistic features than novices’. These findings indicate that experts’ judgments are more nuanced and may rely less on fine-grained structural features of narratives, highlighting the importance of capturing individual differences and multidimensionality in story perception.