by Dan Heath
Pam Laffin, the Antiauthority
Pam Laffin was the star of a series of antismoking TV ads that were broadcast in the mid-1990s. Laffin is not a celebrity and she’s not a health expert. She’s a smoker.
At the time, Laffin was a twenty-nine-year-old mother of two. She had started smoking at age ten and had developed emphysema by age twenty-four. She’d suffered a failed lung transplant.
Greg Connolly, the director of tobacco control for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH), was in charge of designing a public-service campaign against smoking. He became aware of Pam Laffin and asked her to share her story with the public. She agreed.
Connolly said, “What we’ve learned from previous campaigns is that telling stories using real people is the most compelling way.” The MDPH filmed a series of thirty-second spots, broadcast during hip shows such as Ally McBeal and Dawson’s Creek. The spots were brutal. They showed Laffin battling to live while slowly suffocating because of her failing lungs. The TV audience watched her enduring an invasive bronchoscopy—a procedure in which a tube with a camera at the end is inserted through the mouth and pushed into the lungs. The spots showed the nasty surgical scars on her back.
In another spot, featuring photos of Laffin as a child and as an adult, she talks about how her emphysema left her with a “fat face” and “a hump on my neck.” She said, “I started smoking to look older and I’m sorry to say it worked.”
The spots were difficult to watch, and contrasted jarringly with the light soap-opera fare of shows like Dawson’s Creek. “We have no compunction at all about shocking smokers into waking up,” Connolly said.
Laffin became a heroine of the antismoking movement. She was the subject of an MTV documentary. The Centers for Disease Control features her story in an antismoking Web campaign and a twenty-minute educational video titled I Can’t Breathe.
She died in November 2000 at the age of thirty-one, three weeks before she was scheduled for a second lung transplant.
After hearing Laffin’s story you’re probably not surprised that she was an effective spokeswoman. There’s no question that she knew from personal experience what she was talking about. She had a powerful tale to tell.
Another example of drawing credibility from antiauthorities comes from the Doe Fund in New York City, an organization that takes homeless men—the John Does of our society—and turns them into productive citizens through counseling, drug rehabilitation, and, most important, job training. A few years ago, some representatives from a grant organization—potential financial supporters—were going to visit the offices of the Doe Fund. The Doe Fund sent a driver, Dennis, to pick them up and drive them to the home office.
Dennis had been homeless before he turned to the Doe Fund for help. During the forty-five-minute car trip, Dennis shared his story with the grant representatives. One commented, “We weren’t just sitting around listening to a bunch of directors telling us how effective their services are; Dennis was the best ambassador that the Doe Fund could provide—he was living proof.” The Doe Fund also uses this principle internally. Every homeless man who enters the program is matched with a mentor who, two years before, was in the same situation.
It’s worth reminding ourselves that it wasn’t obvious that Laffin or Dennis would be effective authorities. Thirty years ago, an antismoking campaign like Laffin’s would probably not have happened. Instead, the Surgeon General would have given us a stern lecture on the dangers of smoking. Or Burt Reynolds would have extolled the virtues of a smoke-free life.
A citizen of the modern world, constantly inundated with messages, learns to develop skepticism about the sources of those messages.
Who’s behind these messages? Should I trust them? What do they have to gain if I believe them?
A commercial claiming that a new shampoo makes your hair bouncier has less credibility than hearing your best friend rave about how a new shampoo made her own hair bouncier. Well, duh. The company wants to sell you shampoo. Your friend doesn’t, so she gets more trust points. The takeaway is that it can be the honesty and trustworthiness of our sources, not their status, that allows them to act as authorities. Sometimes antiauthorities are even better than authorities.
The Power of Details
We don’t always have an external authority who can vouch for our message; most of the time our messages have to vouch for themselves. They must have “internal credibility.” Of course, internal credibility frequently depends on what topic we’re discussing: A credible math proof looks different from a credible movie review. But, surprisingly, there are some general principles for establishing internal credibility. To see these principles in action, we can again turn to urban legends.
The Boyfriend’s Death is a famous urban legend that begins with a couple heading out on a date in the boyfriend’s car. The car runs out of gas under a tree on a deserted road. The girl suspects that the guy is faking in order to make out with her, but soon she realizes they’re really stuck. The boyfriend decides to walk to the nearest house for help, and the girl stays behind. He has been gone for a long time—it feels like hours—and the girl is frightened by a creepy scratching coming from the roof of the car, possibly the scrapings of a low-hanging tree branch. After several hours of anxious waiting, the girl gets out of the car to discover—cue the horror music!—her boyfriend, murdered and hanging from the tree above the car. His toes scrape the roof as he swings in the wind.
When people pass this legend along, they always add particular details. It’s always set in a specific location, which varies when it is told in different parts of the country: “It happened right off Farm Road 121;” “It happened right on top of that bluff over Lake Travis.” An expert on folk legends, Jan Brunvand, says that legends “acquire a good deal of their credibility and effect from their localized details.”
A person’s knowledge of details is often a good proxy for her expertise. Think of how a history buff can quickly establish her credibility by telling an interesting Civil War anecdote. But concrete details don’t just lend credibility to the authorities who provide them; they lend credibility to the idea itself. The Civil War anecdote, with lots of interesting details, is credible in anyone’s telling. By making a claim tangible and concrete, details make it seem more real, more believable.
Jurors and the Darth Vader Toothbrush
In 1986, Jonathan Shedler and Melvin Manis, researchers at the University of Michigan, created an experiment to simulate a trial. Subjects were asked to play the role of jurors and were given the transcript of a (fictitious) trial to read. The jurors were asked to assess the fitness of a mother, Mrs. Johnson, and to decide whether her seven-year-old son should remain in her care.
The transcript was constructed to be closely balanced: There were eight arguments against Mrs. Johnson and eight arguments for Mrs. Johnson. All the jurors heard the same arguments. The only difference was the level of detail in those arguments. In one experimental group, all the arguments that supported Mrs. Johnson had some vivid detail, whereas the arguments against her had no extra details; they were pallid by comparison. The other group heard the opposite combination.
As an example, one argument in Mrs. Johnson’s favor said: “Mrs. Johnson sees to it that her child washes and brushes his teeth before bedtime.” In the vivid form, the argument added a detail: “He uses a Star Wars toothbrush that looks like Darth Vader.”
An argument against Mrs. Johnson was: “The child went to school with a badly scraped arm which Mrs. Johnson had not cleaned or at tended to. The school nurse had to clean the scrape.” The vivid form added the detail that, as the nurse was cleaning the scrape, she spilled Mercurochrome on herself, staining her uniform red.
The researchers carefully tested the arguments with and without vivid details to ensure that they had the same perceived importance—the details were designed to be irrelevant to the judgment of Mrs. Johnson’s worthiness. It mattered that Mrs. Johnson didn’t attend to the scraped arm; it didn
’t matter that the nurse’s uniform got stained in the process.
But even though the details shouldn’t have mattered, they did. Jurors who heard the favorable arguments with vivid details judged Mrs. Johnson to be a more suitable parent (5.8 out of 10) than did jurors who heard the unfavorable arguments with vivid details (4.3 out of 10). The details had a big impact.
We can take comfort, perhaps, in the fact that the swing wasn’t more dramatic. (If the mother’s fitness had dropped from eight to two, we might have had to worry a bit about our justice system.) But the jurors did make different judgments based on irrelevant vivid details. So why did the details make a difference? They boosted the credibility of the argument. If I can mentally see the Darth Vader toothbrush, it’s easier for me to picture the boy diligently brushing his teeth in the bathroom, which in turn reinforces the notion that Mrs. Johnson is a good mother.
What we should learn from urban legends and the Mrs. Johnson trial is that vivid details boost credibility. But what should also be added is that we need to make use of truthful, core details. We need to identify details that are as compelling and human as the “Darth Vader toothbrush” but more meaningful—details that symbolize and support our core idea.
In 2004, two Stanford Business School professors held a workshop with arts organizations in Washington, D.C. One exercise was de signed to make the arts leaders focus on the enduring principles of their organizations, the principles they would not compromise under any circumstances. One organization at the workshop was the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange (LLDE), “a company of dance artists that creates, performs, teaches, and engages people in making art.” At the workshop, the leaders from the LLDE maintained that one of their core values was “diversity.”
“Come on,” scoffed one of the professors, suspecting an exaggeration. “Everyone claims that they value diversity, but you’re a dance company. You’re probably filled with a bunch of twenty-five-year-old dancers, all of them tall and thin. Some of them are probably people of color, but is that diversity?” Other people in the audience, unfamiliar with the LLDE, nodded at this skeptical response.
Peter DiMuro, the artistic director of the LLDE, responded with an example. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “the longest-term member of our company is a seventy-three-year-old man named Thomas Dwyer. He came to the LLDE after a full career working for the U.S. government when he retired in 1988, and had no previous dance experience. He has now been with the LLDE for seventeen years.”
This detail—seventy-three-year-old Thomas Dwyer—silenced the skepticism in the room. The professors experienced a rare moment of speechlessness.
And there was a good reason that DiMuro could respond quickly with a vivid example. The reason is that diversity truly is a core value at the LLDE. It’s part of the LLDE’s organizational DNA.
In 2002, Liz Lerman won a MacArthur “genius grant” for her work creating modern dance involving communities throughout the United States. In a dance project called Hallelujah/U.S.A., Lerman visited communities across the country and asked residents what made them thankful. Then she choreographed dances around those themes of praise. The final performances featured members of the local community: teenage female Hmong dancers in Minneapolis, Border collie owners in Virginia, and a group of six card-playing ladies from Burlington, Vermont, who’d missed only two of their weekly card games in forty years.
Now, a brief aside to the eye-rolling skeptics out there, to whom a modern dance performance sounds as appealing as being buried alive: Whether or not you’d like to spend your weekends watching the gyrations of Border collie owners, you’ve got to admit that the LLDE is diverse. It’s real diversity, not workspeak diversity.
The example of Thomas Dwyer—the seventy-three-year-old former government employee—is a vivid, concrete symbol of a core organization value. It’s a symbol both to supporters and to the dancers themselves. No one wants to participate in a “dance project” and be the only balding, middle-aged guy on a stage full of Twiggys. The LLDE’s claim that diversity was a core value gained credibility from the details of Dwyer’s example, rather than from an external source.
Beyond War
The use of vivid details is one way to create internal credibility—to weave sources of credibility into the idea itself. Another way is to use statistics. Since grade school, we’ve been taught to support our arguments with statistical evidence. But statistics tend to be eye-glazing. How can we use them while still managing to engage our audience?
Geoff Ainscow and other leaders of the Beyond War movement in the 1980s were determined to find a way to address the following paradox: When we see a child running with scissors, we wince. We shout at her to stop. Yet when we read newspaper articles about nuclear weapons—which have the power to destroy millions of children—it provokes, at best, only a moment of dismay.
Beyond War was started by a group of citizens who were alarmed by the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. At this point, the combined Soviet and American nuclear arsenals were sufficient to destroy the world multiple times. The Beyond War participants went door-to-door in their neighborhoods, hoping to galvanize a public outcry against the arms race. They struggled with the problem of how to make credible their belief that the arms race was out of control. How do you make clear to people the staggering destructive capability of the world’s nuclear stockpile? It’s so intangible, so invisible. And yet telling stories, or providing details, seems inadequate: Grappling with the nuclear arms race requires us to grapple with the scale of it. Scale relies on numbers.
Beyond War would arrange “house parties,” in which a host family invited a group of friends and neighbors over, along with a Beyond War representative to speak to them. Ainscow recounts a simple demonstration that the group used in its presentations. He always carried a metal bucket to the gatherings. At the appropriate point in the presentation, he’d take a BB out of his pocket and drop it into the empty bucket. The BB made a loud clatter as it ricocheted and settled. Ainscow would say, “This is the Hiroshima bomb.” He then spent a few minutes describing the devastation of the Hiroshima bomb—the miles of flattened buildings, the tens of thousands killed immediately, the larger number of people with burns or other long-term health problems.
Next, he’d drop ten BBs into the bucket. The clatter was louder and more chaotic. “This is the firepower of the missiles on one U.S. or Soviet nuclear submarine,” he’d say.
Finally, he asked the attendees to close their eyes. He’d say, “This is the world’s current arsenal of nuclear weapons.” Then he poured 5,000 BBs into the bucket (one for every nuclear warhead in the world). The noise was startling, even terrifying. “The roar of the BBs went on and on,” said Ainscow. “Afterward there was always dead silence.”
This approach is an ingenious way to convey a statistic. Let’s unpack it a bit. First, Beyond War had a core belief: “The public needs to wake up and do something about the arms race.” Second, the group’s members determined what was unexpected about the message: Everyone knew that the world’s nuclear arsenal had grown since World War II, but no one realized the scale of the growth. Third, they had a statistic to make their belief credible—i.e., that the world had 5,000 nuclear warheads when a single one was enough to decimate a city. But the problem was that the number 5,000 means very little to people. The trick was to make this large number meaningful.
The final twist was the demonstration—the bucket and the BBs, which added a sensory dimension to an otherwise abstract concept. Furthermore, the demonstration was carefully chosen—BBs are weapons, and the sound of the BBs hitting the bucket was fittingly threatening.
Notice something that may be counterintuitive: The statistic didn’t stick. It couldn’t possibly stick. No one who saw the demonstration would remember, a week later, that there were 5,000 nuclear warheads in the world.
What did stick was the sudden, visceral awareness of a huge danger—the massive scale-up from World War II’s limited ato
mic weaponry to the present worldwide arsenal. It was irrelevant whether there were 4,135 nuclear warheads or 9,437. The point was to hit people in the gut with the realization that this was a problem that was out of control.
This is the most important thing to remember about using statistics effectively. Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.
The Human-Scale Principle
Another way to bring statistics to life is to contextualize them in terms that are more human, more everyday. As a scientific example, contrast the following two statements:
Scientists recently computed an important physical constraint to an extraordinary accuracy. To put the accuracy in perspective, imagine throwing a rock from the sun to the earth and hitting the target within one third of a mile of dead center.
Scientists recently computed an important physical constraint to an extraordinary accuracy. To put the accuracy in perspective, imagine throwing a rock from New York to Los Angeles and hitting the target within two thirds of an inch of dead center.
Which statement seems more accurate?
As you may have guessed, the accuracy levels in both questions are exactly the same, but when different groups evaluated the two statements, 58 percent of respondents ranked the statistic about the sun to the earth as “very impressive.” That jumped to 83 percent for the statistic about New York to Los Angeles. We have no human experience, no intuition, about the distance between the sun and the earth. The distance from New York to Los Angeles is much more tangible. (Though, frankly, it’s still far from tangible. The problem is that if you make the distance more tangible—like a football field—then the accuracy becomes intangible. “Throwing a rock the distance of a football field to an accuracy of 3.4 microns” doesn’t help.)