Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Dan Heath

  Four million Angolans—one third of the population—have been forced to flee their homes.

  More than 11 million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance.

  The other version of the letter gave information about a single young girl:

  Any money that you donate will go to Rokia, a seven-year-old girl from Mali, Africa. Rokia is desperately poor and faces the threat of severe hunger or even starvation. Her life will be changed for the better as a result of your financial gift. With your support, and the support of other caring sponsors, Save the Children will work with Rokia’s family and other members of the community to help feed and educate her and provide basic medical care and hygiene education.

  The researchers gave participants one of the two different letters, then left them alone. They chose how much money, if any, to put back into the envelope, then they sealed the envelope and handed it back to a researcher.

  On average, the people who read the statistics contributed $1.14. The people who read about Rokia contributed $2.38—more than twice as much. It seems that most people have something in common with Mother Teresa: When it comes to our hearts, one individual trumps the masses.

  The researchers believed that the smaller donations for the statistical letter could be a result of what they called the “drop in the bucket effect.” If people felt overwhelmed by the scale of the problem, their small donations might have seemed meaningless. But here’s where things get even more interesting. The researchers decided to give a third group of people both sets of information—the statistics and the story about Rokia. The researchers wondered whether people who got all the information would give more, on average, than the $2.38 that had been given by the Rokia group. Perhaps the combination of statistics and stories—the power of individual need coupled with the statistical scale of the problem—would inspire a whole new level of giving.

  Nope. The people who received both letters gave $1.43, almost a dollar less than the people who got the Rokia story alone. Somehow the statistics—evidence of massive human suffering in Africa—actually made people less charitable. What was going on?

  The researchers theorized that thinking about statistics shifts people into a more analytical frame of mind. When people think analytically, they’re less likely to think emotionally. And the researchers believed it was people’s emotional response to Rokia’s plight that led them to act.

  To prove this argument, they ran a second study. In this study they primed some people to think in an analytical way by asking questions such as, “If an object travels at five feet per minute, then by your calculations how many feet will it travel in 360 seconds?” Other people were primed to think in terms of feelings: “Please write down one word to describe how you feel when you hear the word ‘baby.’”

  Then both groups were given the Rokia letter. And, confirming the researchers’ theory, the analytically primed people gave less. When people were primed to feel before they read about Rokia, they gave $2.34, about the same as before. But when they were primed to calculate before they read about Rokia, they gave $1.26.

  These results are shocking. The mere act of calculation reduced people’s charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.

  • • •

  In the last chapter, we discussed how to convince people that our ideas are credible, how to make them believe. Belief counts for a lot, but belief isn’t enough. For people to take action, they have to care.

  Everyone believes there is tremendous human suffering in Africa; there’s no doubt about the facts. But belief does not necessarily make people care enough to act. Everyone believes that eating lots of fatty food leads to health problems; there’s no doubt about the facts. But the belief does not make people care enough to act.

  Charities have long since figured out the Mother Teresa effect—they know that donors respond better to individuals than to abstract causes. You don’t give to “African poverty,” you sponsor a specific child. (In fact, the idea of sponsoring a child as a charitable hook dates back to the 1950s, when a young Christian minister encouraged Americans to sponsor needy Korean orphans.) The concept works with animals, too. At Farm Sanctuary, a nonprofit organization that fights to reduce cruel treatment of farm animals, donors can “adopt a chicken” ($10 per month), a goat ($25), or a cow ($50).

  No one wants to donate to the General Administrative Fund of a charity. It’s easy to understand, intellectually, why general funds would be needed—someone’s got to buy the staples—but it’s hard to generate a lot of passion for office supplies.

  Charities have learned how to arouse sympathy and compassion in donors—and thank goodness they’re good at it, because their skills ease a lot of suffering. But “making people care” isn’t something that only charities need to do. Managers have to make people care enough to work long and hard on complex tasks. Teachers have to make students care about literature. Activists have to make people care about city council initiatives.

  This chapter tackles the emotional component of stickiness, but it’s not about pushing people’s emotional buttons, like some kind of movie tearjerker. Rather, the goal of making messages “emotional” is to make people care. Feelings inspire people to act.

  As an example, most teenagers believe that cigarette smoking is dangerous. There’s no credibility problem with that message. Yet teenagers still take up smoking. So how do you transform their belief into action? You have to make them care. And, in 1998, someone finally figured out how to do that.

  The Truth

  The commercial starts with a shot of a city street in New York City. The footage is video, not film—it’s a bit dark, a bit unprofessional. It feels like a documentary, not a commercial. A caption flashes at the bottom of the screen: “Outside the headquarters of a major tobacco company.”

  An eighteen-wheeler pulls up in front of the building, and a group of teenagers jump out. The teens begin to unload long white sacks marked “Body Bag.” They stack the bags on top of one another near the edge of the building. As the commercial progresses, the pile of body bags gets bigger and bigger. By the end of the ad, there are hundreds of bags in the pile. One of the teens shouts at the building through a megaphone, “Do you know how many people tobacco kills every day?” The daily death toll is revealed to be 1,800—the number of body bags the teens have piled up in front of the tobacco headquarters.

  This ad is part of a series of ads called the Truth campaign. The campaign was launched by the American Legacy Foundation, which was formed in November 1998 after forty-six state attorneys-general settled a lawsuit against major U.S. tobacco companies.

  You can’t watch the Truth ads without getting angry at tobacco companies. After the ads began airing, Philip Morris invoked a special Big Tobacco “anti-vilification” clause to have the spots yanked from the air. The tobacco companies inserted this clause in the settlements of a number of antitobacco lawsuits; it gives them some veto power over how the settlement money can be spent on antismoking advertising. “We felt that [the Truth ads] are not consistent with the focus and mission of the American Legacy Foundation,” said Carolyn Levy, Philip Morris’s senior vice president for youth-smoking prevention, in reference to the censorship effort.

  One translation of this complaint: The ads were working.

  Meanwhile, another series of antismoking ads started to run. As part of the tobacco settlement, Philip Morris agreed to air its own series of antismoking ads. The Philip Morris tagline was “Think. Don’t Smoke.”

  Two campaigns were launched, almost simultaneously, with two different approaches. This juxtaposition set up an exciting, head-to-head horse race in the marketplace of ideas. In fact, in June 2002, an article in the American Journal of Public Health surveyed 10,692 teenagers to compare the Truth campaign with “Think. Don’t Smoke.”

  It turns out that some horses run better than others. When kids were asked to recall any antitobacco advertising the
y had seen, the Truth campaign was remembered spontaneously by 22 percent of them; the Think campaign by 3 percent. What’s particularly striking about this statistic is that when the kids were prompted with information from the campaigns, more than 70 percent of them remembered seeing both. In other words, teens had seen both ads on TV, but one stuck better than the other. Something about the Truth campaign was spontaneously memorable.

  Memory is important, but it’s only the first step. What about action? When the survey asked kids whether they were likely to smoke a cigarette during the next year, those who were exposed to the Truth campaign were 66 percent less likely to smoke. Those who were exposed to “Think. Don’t Smoke” were 36 percent more likely to smoke! Tobacco execs must have taken the news quite hard.

  It wasn’t just surveys that registered the difference. A study measured teen smoking in Florida, where the Truth campaign had its debut, versus the rest of the country. After two years of the campaign, smoking among high school students dropped by 18 percent and among middle school students by 40 percent. (About half of this decline may have been associated with a rise in cigarette taxes during the time of the study.)

  What happened here? It’s the Save the Children example revisited. What is the “Think. Don’t Smoke” campaign about? Er, thinking. It’s the Analytical Hat. Remember what happened with contributions to Rokia when donors were asked to think analytically before donating?

  What’s the Truth campaign about? It’s about tapping into anti-authority resentment, the classic teenage emotion. Once, teens smoked to rebel against The Man. Thanks to the ingenious framing of the Truth campaign—which paints a picture of a duplicitous Big Tobacco—teens now rebel against The Man by not smoking.

  The Truth campaign isn’t about rational decision-making; it’s about rebellion. And it made a lot of teens care enough to do something. In this case, that something was nothing.

  Semantic Stretch and the

  Power of Association

  So far we’ve been talking about what you might expect from a chapter on emotion—complex, fundamental human emotions like empathy (Rokia) and anger (the Truth). But the main question of this chapter is even more basic: How do we make people care about our messages? The good news is that to make people care about our ideas we don’t have to produce emotion from an absence of emotion. In fact, many ideas use a sort of piggybacking strategy, associating themselves with emotions that already exist.

  Consider the following sentence from a movie review: “Rashomon can be seen as a cinematic extension of Einstein’s theory of relativity.” Rashomon is a classic 1950 film by the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. In the film, four different characters describe the same event—a murder and rape—from their own perspectives. The movie is told in a series of flashbacks, as each of the characters recounts his or her version of events. But the characters’ tales are self-serving and contradictory, and at the end of the movie the viewer is still uncertain about what actually happened. The movie questions the existence of absolute truth—or, at least, our ability to uncover it.

  So the movie reviewer, in the quote above, was comparing Rashomon’s “relative truth” to Einstein’s theory of relativity. But Einstein’s theory of relativity wasn’t designed to say that “everything is relative.” In fact, its actual meaning was essentially the opposite. The theory was designed to explain how the laws of physics are identical in every frame of reference. From Einstein’s view, things don’t look unpredictable; they look surprisingly orderly.

  Why did the reviewer link Rashomon with relativity? This reference doesn’t look like an appeal to Einstein’s authority; it claims that Rashomon is the cinematic “equivalent” of Einstein’s theory. Instead, the analogy seems intended to create a sense of awe—when we watch Rashomon, it implies, we will be in the presence of something profound.

  The theory of relativity is borrowed, as an association, because it lends an aura of emotional resonance—profundity, awe—to the movie. The movie review above is just one example among thousands. “Relativity” becomes, in a sense, a color on the idea palette. When you want to conjure up awe, you dab your brush into “relativity.” Other scientific terms—the “uncertainty principle,” “chaos theory,” the “quantum leap” of quantum mechanics—are also colors on this palette.

  In 1929, Einstein protested, “Philosophers play with the word, like a child with a doll…. It does not mean that everything in life is relative.” To Einstein’s chagrin, the number of people trying to tap into the resonance of “relativity” began to exceed the number of people who were trying to understand relativity.

  When associations to certain terms are drawn repeatedly—sometimes with precision, sometimes with crudeness—the effect is to dilute the power of the terms and their underlying concepts. When everyone paints with lime green, lime green no longer stands out.

  Research conducted at Stanford and Yale shows that this process—exploiting terms and concepts for their emotional associations—is a common characteristic of communication. People tend to overuse any idea or concept that delivers an emotional kick. The research labeled this overuse “semantic stretch.”

  Let’s look at a nonscientific example: the word “unique.” “Unique” used to mean one of a kind. “Unique” was special.

  The researchers used a database to examine every newspaper article in each of the top fifty newspapers in the United States over a twenty-year period. During this time, the percentage of articles in which something was described as “unique” increased by 73 percent. So either there’s a lot more unique stuff in the world today or the “uniqueness bar” has been lowered.

  Perhaps some skeptics, contemplating robot vacuum cleaners or Paris Hilton, would protest, “Hey, there is a lot more unique stuff in the world these days.” But at the same time that the word “unique” was rising in popularity, the word “unusual” was falling. In 1985, articles were more than twice as likely to use the word “unusual” as the word “unique.” By 2005, the two words were about equally likely to be used.

  Unique things should be a subset of unusual things—unique (i.e., one of a kind) is about as unusual as you can get. So if there really were more unique things today, we should see more “unusual” things as well. The fact that unusual things are getting less common makes the rise in unique things look like a case of semantic stretch. What we used to call “unusual” we now stretch and call “unique.”

  So where’s the emotion in “relativity” and in “unique”? Here’s the punch line: The most basic way to make people care is to form an association between something they don’t yet care about and something they do care about. We all naturally practice the tactic of association. What “relativity” and “unique” teach us is that in using associations we can overuse colors. Over time, associations get overused and become diluted in value; people end up saying things like “This is really, truly unique.”

  The superlatives of one generation—groovy, awesome, cool, phat—fade over time because they’ve been associated with too many things. When you hear your father call something “cool,” coolness loses its punch. When your finance professor starts using the word “dude,” you must eliminate the word from your vocabulary. Using associations, then, is an arms race of sorts. The other guy builds a missile, so you have to build two. If he’s “unique,” you’ve got to be “super-unique.”

  This emotional-association arms race creates problems for people who are trying to make others care. In fact, as we’ll see, the arms race essentially bankrupted the term “sportsmanship.”

  Fighting Semantic Stretch:

  The Case of “Sportsmanship”

  In the last chapter, we discussed the coaching seminars held by Jim Thompson, the founder of the Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA). Since 1988, when he founded the PCA, Thompson has struggled with an important problem. How do you clean up the bad behavior often associated with youth sports? In grappling with this problem, Thompson had to confront the issue of semantic stretch.


  The tennis player John McEnroe was once the poster child of poor sportsmanship, with his racket-throwing and bratty arguments with officials. But today McEnroe’s behavior wouldn’t raise an eyebrow at many youth sports games. Bad behavior is now common not only among athletes but also among parents and other spectators. According to the National Alliance for Youth Sports, nearly 15 percent of youth sports games involved a confrontation between parents or coaches and officials, up from 5 percent a few years ago.

  Sportsmanship was once a powerful idea in athletics, but Thompson felt that it had become a weak term. “Sportsmanship trophies are seen as consolation prizes for losers,” he says. One woman told Thompson that her high school basketball coach said that if his players ever won a sportsmanship trophy, they’d have to run laps. Thompson adds, “Sportsmanship seems like it is mostly about not doing something bad: ‘Don’t yell at officials. Don’t break the rules.’ But it’s not enough to simply refuse to do bad things. We need to expect much more of participants in youth sports. Unfortunately, ‘Be a good sport!’ is not the rallying cry that we need to transform youth sports.”

  Everyone enjoys hearing about real examples of good sportsmanship. Thompson uses the example of Lance Armstrong, who reacted unexpectedly when one of his chief opponents, Jan Ullrich, crashed during the Tour de France. Instead of taking advantage of this lucky break to increase his lead, Armstrong slowed down and waited for Ullrich to remount. He later said that he rode better when he was competing with a great athlete like Ullrich. That’s sportsmanship.

  Thompson knew that people still admired the underlying ideals of sportsmanship. Parents did want their kids to learn respect and manners from athletics. Coaches did want to be mentors, not just victorious taskmasters. Kids did want their teams to be respected by others. All three groups sometimes slipped up and acted like jerks. But Thompson saw that the need and the desire for sportsmanship remained, even though the term “sportsmanship” had lost its ability to motivate good behavior.