Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Dan Heath

  Make statistics accessible. Nuclear warheads as BBs. The Human Scale principle. Stephen Covey’s analogy of a workplace to a soccer team. Clinic: Shark attack hysteria.

  Find an example that passes the Sinatra Test. “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.” Transporting Bollywood movies: “We handled Harry Potter and your brother’s board exams.” A business-friendly environmentalist and the textile factory that actually purified the water that fed it—and yielded fabric that was edible.

  Use testable credentials. “Try before you buy.” Where’s the beef? Snapple supports the KKK?! Coaches: It’s easier to tear down than to build up: Filling the Emotional Tank. NBA rookie orientation: “These women all have AIDS.”

  5. Emotional MAKE PEOPLE CARE.

  The Mother Teresa principle: If I look at the one, I will act. People donate more to Rokia than to a huge swath of Africa. The Truth anti-smoking campaign: What made kids care was not health concerns but anticorporate rebellion.

  USE THE POWER OF ASSOCIATION.

  The need to fight semantic stretch: the diluted meaning of “relativity” and why “unique” isn’t unique anymore. Transforming “sportsmanship” into “honoring the game.”

  APPEAL TO SELF-INTEREST (AND NOT JUST BASE SELF-INTEREST).

  Mail-order ads—“They laughed when I sat down at the piano….” WIIFY. Cable television in Tempe: Visualizing what it could do for you. Avoid Maslow’s basement: our false assumption that other people are baser than we are. Floyd Lee and his Iraq mess tent: “I’m in charge of morale.”

  APPEAL TO IDENTITY.

  The firemen who rejected the popcorn popper. Understand how people make decisions based on identity. (Who am I? What kind of situation is this? And what do people like me do in this kind of situation?) Clinic: Why study algebra? Don’t mess with Texas: Texans don’t litter. Don’t forget the Curse of Knowledge—don’t assume, like the defenders of the duo piano, that others care at the same level that you do.

  6. Stories

  GET PEOPLE TO ACT.

  STORIES AS SIMULATION (TELL PEOPLE HOW TO ACT).

  The day the heart monitor lied: how the nurse acted. Shop talk at Xerox: how the repairman acted. Visualizing “how I got here”: simulating problems to solve them. Use stories as flight simulators. Clinic: Dealing with problem students.

  STORIES AS INSPIRATION (GIVE PEOPLE ENERGY TO ACT).

  Jared, the 425-pound fast-food dieter. How to spot inspiring stories. Look for three key plots: Challenge (to overcome obstacles), Connection (to get along or reconnect), Creativity (to inspire a new way of thinking). Tell a springboard story: a story that helps people see how an existing problem might change. Stephen Denning at the World Bank: a health worker in Zambia. You can extract a moral from a story, but you can’t extract a story from a moral. Why speakers got mad when people boiled down their presentations to stories.

  What Sticks.

  USE WHAT STICKS.

  Nice guys finish last. Elementary, my dear Watson. It’s the economy, stupid. The power of spotting. Why good speaking skills aren’t necessarily good sticking skills: Stanford students and the speech exercise. A final warning about the Curse of Knowledge.

  Remember how SUCCESs helps people to:

  Pay attention Unexpected

  Understand and remember Concrete

  Believe and agree Credible

  Care Emotional

  Act Stories

  Simple helps at many stages. Most important, it tells you what to say.

  Symptoms and solutions: For practical guidance, see Symptoms and Solutions.

  John F. Kennedy versus Floyd Lee: How normal people, in normal situations, can make a profound difference with their sticky ideas.

  Introduction: What Sticks?

  “Comprehensive community building”: Tony Proscio, “In Other Words: A Plea for Plain Speaking in Foundations,” Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, 2000.

  The Truth About Movie Popcorn: A good account of the popcorn story is in Howard Kurtz, “The Great Exploding Popcorn Exposé,” Washington Post, May 12, 1994, C1.

  Who Spoiled Halloween?: The story of the contaminated Halloween candy legend is told in Joel Best and Gerald T. Horiuchi, “The Razor Blade and the Apple: The Social Construction of Urban Legends,” Social Forces 32 (1985): 488–99. Joel Best is one of a group of sociologists who study the “construction” of social problems. Social concerns about various problems such as drunk driving, drug abuse, or poisoned Halloween candy do not always match the underlying incidence of problems, and sociologists have tried to understand how social problems become defined as “problems.” For another interesting read on this topic, see Joel Best, Random Violence: How We Talk About New Crimes and New Victims (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

  the Curse of Knowledge: The Curse of Knowledge concept comes from C. F. Camerer, G. Loewenstein, and M. Weber, “The Curse of Knowledge in Economic Settings: An Experimental Analysis,” Journal of Political Economy 97 (1989): 1232–54. The Curse of Knowledge increases as people gain more expertise. Pamela Hinds asked experts (salespeople at a cellular company) to predict how long novice cell-phone users would take to learn to perform various tasks (e.g., storing a greeting on voice mail or saving some messages and deleting others). Experts dramatically underestimated the amount of time it would take novice users to accomplish the tasks (i.e., they estimated that it would take thirteen minutes to perform functions that actually took thirty-three minutes), and their estimates did not improve when they were specifically asked to think about the problems they encountered while they were originally learning. See Pamela J. Hinds, “The Curse of Expertise: The Effects of Expertise and Debiasing Methods on Predicting Novice Performance,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 5 (1999): 205–21. See also brilliant work in psychology by Boas Keysar, Linda E. Ginzel, and Max H. Bazerman, “States of Affairs and States of Mind: The Effect of Knowledge on Beliefs,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 64 (1995): 283–93. Ironically, the Curse of Knowledge has been well documented in economic and market settings, where people should have the greatest incentives to try to overcome it (see http://curse-of-knowledge.behaviouralfinance.net/). If you can’t overcome the Curse of Knowledge when it’s costing you lots of money, it’s going to be even harder to detect and overcome it in day-to-day situations. 19 In 1990, Elizabeth Newton: L. Newton, “Overconfidence in the Communication of Intent: Heard and Unheard Melodies,” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1990.

  In 1999, an Israeli research team: Jacob Goldenberg, David Mazursky, and Sorin Solomon, “The Fundamental Templates of Quality Ads,” Marketing Science 18 (1999): 333–51. The Pictorial Analogy template features extreme analogies rendered visually. For instance, a Nike ad is shot from the perspective of someone jumping from a tall building. A group of firemen are on the street below, preparing to cushion the jumper’s fall with an oversized Nike sneaker. The tagline reads, “Something soft between you and the pavement.” The majority of the winners are composed of Pictorial Analogy and Extreme Consequences. The other templates were Extreme Situations (in which a product is shown performing under unusual circumstances or in which a product’s attribute is exaggerated to the extreme), Competition (in which a product is shown winning in competition with another product, often in an unusual usage situation), Interactive Experiments (where listeners interact with the product directly—see “Testable Credentials” in Chapter 4), and Dimensionality Alteration (e.g., a time leap that shows the long-run implications of a decision).

  1. Simple

  Herb Kelleher … once told: James Carville and Paul Begala, Buck Up, Suck Up, and Come Back When You Foul Up (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 88. This is one of the most interesting books we’ve found about the dynamics of political campaigns, and there’s a chapter on how to communicate in a political campaign that echoes several of the principles we cover in this book: tell stories (“facts tell but stories sell”), be emotional, and be unique (their versio
n of “Unexpected”).

  A healthy 17-year-old heart: Jonathan Bor, “It Fluttered and Became Bruce Murray’s Heart,” Syracuse Post-Standard, May 12, 1984.

  JERUSALEM, Nov. 4: Barton Gellman, “Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin Is Killed,” Washington Post, November 5, 1995. Chip Scanlon has a great collection of online columns describing the tradecraft of journalism, including one that contains the two headlines here: www.poynter.org/column.asp?id= 52&aid=35609.

  the inverted pyramid arose: Rich Cameron, “Understanding the Lead and the Inverted Pyramid Structure Are Staples of Journalism 101 Classes,” The Inverted Pyramid, 2003. See www.cerritosjournalism.com, in the section entitled “101—Newswriting.”

  “It was simple”: Carville’s advice to remember the basics is from Mary Matalin and James Carville, All’s Fair: Love, War, and Running for President (New York: Random House, 1994), 244. The Clinton interchange leading up to the “If you say three things, you don’t say anything” quote is.

  In 1954, the economist L. J. Savage: Leonard J. Savage, The Foundations of Statistics (New York: Wiley, 1954).

  Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir: The study about the Christmas vacation in Hawaii study is in Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir, “The Disjunction Effect in Choice Under Uncertainty,” Psychological Science 3 (1992): 305–9. The lecture/foreign film/library study is found in Donald A. Redelmeier and Eldar Shafir, “Medical Decision Making in Situations That Offer Multiple Alternatives,” Journal of the American Medical Association 273 (1995): 302–6. The phenomenon of decision paralysis is pronounced even for professionals. Redelmeier and Shafir show that doctors will delay in prescribing any treatment when they are forced to choose among multiple good treatments.

  Sun Exposure: Precautions and Protection: Message 1 of the Sun Exposure

  Idea Clinic is from http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/5000/5550.html. 47 Cervantes defined proverbs: The discussion of proverbs is based on Paul Hernandi and Francis Steen, “The Tropical Landscapes of Proverbial: A Crossdisciplinary Travelogue,” Style 33 (1999): 1–20.

  “The real barrier to the initial PDAs”: Tom Kelley, The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm (New York: Doubleday Currency, 2001).

  J FKFB INAT OUP: The letter/acronym exercise demonstrates the classic principle of “chunking” from cognitive psychology. Working memory is sufficient to hold only about seven independent pieces of information. (See George Miller’s classic description in “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” Psychological Review 63 (1956): 81–97. In the first exercise, the chunks are letters, and most people can hold about seven of them. In the second, the chunks are pre-stored acronyms; people can remember around seven acronyms even though they each contain multiple letters. By taking advantage of preexisting chunks of information, we can cram more information into a limited attentional space.

  Psychologists define schema: Schemas are part of the standard tool kit of cognitive and social psychology. For an interesting discussion of schemas in social perception, see Chapters 4 and 5 of Susan T. Fiske and Shelley E. Taylor, Social Cognition, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991). For an interesting summary of cognitive psychology research on schemas, see Chapter 2 of David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

  An analogy is a good way of helping people access the knowledge in a schema. Educational psychologists have published a number of papers on the value of analogies in learning new material, particularly Richard Mayer. In a 1980 paper, he helped students learn to program the language of a database. One group of students was given analogies for the structure of the computer: “The long-term storage function of the computer was described as a file cabinet; the sorting function was described as an in-basket, save basket, and discard basket on an office desk.” When students were confronting easy problems, the analogies didn’t matter much, but when the problems became more complex, students who had been given analogies were about twice as good as the others. See R. Mayer, “Elaborate Techniques That Increase the Meaningfulness of Technical Text: An Experimental Test of the Learning Strategy Hypothesis,” Journal of Educational Psychology 72 (1980): 770–84.

  Metaphor is another way of allowing people to access the knowledge in a schema. George Lakoff has, in a number of books, shown how deep metaphors structure the way that we understand and talk about the world (e.g., George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980]). For example, we talk about and think of love as a journey (Look at how far we’ve come. We’re at a crossroads. We’re off track.) Lakoff has been better than anyone else at recognizing the pervasive ways in which such metaphors affect our communication, but metaphors need not be deep or pervasive to be useful in conveying a message; they just need to be shared by the relevant audience, as in the discussion of “high concept” in Hollywood.

  Good metaphors are “generative”: D. A. Schon, “Generative Metaphor: A Perspective on Problem-Solving in Social Policy,” in Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed., edited by A. Ortony, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

  Disney calls its employees “cast members”: The examples from Disney are from: Disney Institute, Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service (New York: Disney Editions, 2001).

  2. Unexpected

  A flight attendant named Karen Wood: It’s no accident that Karen Wood was a flight attendant on Southwest Airlines. See Kevin Freiberg and Jackie Freiberg, Nuts! Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success (Austin, Tex.: Bard Press, 1996), 209–10.

  “the surprise brow”: Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Clues (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975). The role of surprise is an understudied topic in psychology, because it falls in the cracks between psychological disciplines. Cognitive researchers who study attention and learning find it too emotional; social psychologists who study emotions such as anger, fear, and disgust find it too cognitive. Yet you could make the case that surprise is the most important emotion because of its role in controlling attention and learning.

  “PHRAUG and TAYBL”: Bruce W. A. Whittlesea and Lisa D. Williams, “The Discrepancy-Attribution Hypothesis II: Expectation, Uncertainty, Surprise, and Feelings of Familiarity,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 27 (2001): 14–33.

  The Nordie who ironed: Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (New York: HarperBusiness, 1994), 118.

  75 Journalism 101: Ephron’s account is in Lorraine Glennon and Mary Mohler, Those Who Can … Teach! Celebrating Teachers Who Make a Difference (Berkeley, Calif.: Wildcat Canyon Press, 1999), 95–96.

  Americans persist in thinking: Message 1 from the foreign aid Clinic is from www.ipjc.org/journal/fall02/nick_mele.htm.

  Polls suggest that most Americans: See surveys conducted by the Program for International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland.

  All of sub-Saharan Africa: As of 2001, sub-Saharan Africa and the entire region of Asia each received a little more than $1 billion per year. Assuming that there are 280 million Americans, twelve soft drinks at a bargain price of $.33 equals $1.1 billion. One movie per year at $8 per movie ticket equals $2.24 billion.

  How do we keep people’s attention?: Arousing people’s interest and keeping it are topics that have been discussed frequently among educational psychologists who want to keep kids engaged in textbooks. Many of their findings are consistent with the topics we consider in this book: Kids are more engaged when texts evoke action and images (Concrete) or emotions (Emotional) or when something is novel (Unexpected, though in our view novelty is more likely to attract interest than to sustain it). Other topics go beyond what we discuss here. For example, kids are more engaged when material is personalized (e.g., they pay more attention to math problems that feature their name
s or the names of their friends), though this customization strategy is hard to apply in general. But most of the research in educational psychology has been limited in that it focuses only on sentence- or paragraph-level characteristics of texts rather than on broader questions, such as how do you get readers to read whole sections, chapters, or books. Cialdini’s observations on mystery and Loewenstein’s gap theory of curiosity would add a great deal to this important area of research. For a review of educational research, see Suzanne Hidi, “Interest and Its Contribution as a Mental Resource for Learning,” Review of Educational Research 60 (1990): 549–71.

  A few years ago, Robert Cialdini: Cialdini wrote his article for psychology professors, but it’s excellent advice for all teachers. See Robert B. Cialdini, “What’s the Best Secret Device for Engaging Student Interest? The Answer Is in the Title,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 24 (2005): 22–29.

  McKee says, “Curiosity”: Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting (New York: ReganBooks, 1997). McKee also has good insight into the difference between gimmicky surprise and surprise that leads to resolution in movies: “We can always shock filmgoers by cutting to something it doesn’t expect to see or away from something it expects to continue.” But he says that “true surprise” happens when a legitimate gap is suddenly revealed between what we expect and what actually happens. The legitimacy comes from a rush of insight, revealing some truth that was previously hidden.