  We study a communication game between a sender and a receiver. The sender
chooses one of her signals about the state of the world (i.e., anecdotes) and
communicates to the receiver who takes an action affecting both players. The
sender and the receiver both care about the state of the world but are also
influenced by personal preferences, so their ideal actions can differ. We
characterize perfect Bayesian equilibria. The sender faces a temptation to
persuade: she wants to select a biased anecdote to influence the receiver's
action. Anecdotes are still informative to the receiver (who will debias at
equilibrium) but the attempt to persuade comes at a cost to precision. This
gives rise to informational homophily where the receiver prefers to listen to
like-minded senders because they provide higher-precision signals.
Communication becomes polarized when the sender is an expert with access to
many signals, with the sender choosing extreme outlier anecdotes at equilibrium
(unless preferences are perfectly aligned). This polarization dissipates all
gains from communication with an increasingly well-informed sender when the
anecdote distribution is heavy-tailed. Experts can therefore face a curse of
informedness: receivers will prefer to listen to less-informed senders who
cannot pick biased signals as easily.
