Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Dan Heath

  In 1994, George Loewenstein: George Loewenstein, “The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation,” Psychological Bulletin 116 (1994): 75–98. This is a brilliant article that reviews decades of psychological research.

  serious parking problem: The parking study is by Charles F. Gettys, Rebecca M. Pliske, Carol Manning, and Jeff T. Casey, “An Evaluation of Human Act Generation Performance,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 39 (1987): 23–51.

  Heretofore, television has done: The Roone Arledge story is from his autobiography, Roone: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). The quote from the memo is.

  In the rubble of Tokyo: The Sony history is from John Nathan, Sony: The Private Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

  “If people like curiosity”: Loewenstein, “Psychology of Curiosity,” 86.

  3. Concrete

  “Business Buzzword Generator”: The buzzword generator was invented by W. Davis Folsom at the University of South Carolina-Aiken. See http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072537892/student_view0/business_jargon_exercise.html.

  Concreteness helps us avoid these problems: The advantages of concrete ideas show up across psychology. Concrete ideas are more memorable. Perhaps the most interesting summary of this evidence is from a book by David Rubin, a cognitive psychologist at Duke University who has spent years trying to understand how aspects of culture—epic sagas, ballads, and children’s rhymes—propagate from person to person and generation to generation. His book Memory in Oral Traditions is a masterful summary of work across the humanities and psychology. Concrete elements are the most likely to survive transmission from one person to another because they are the easiest to understand and remember. See David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-Out Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

  Concrete ideas are also more understandable. In education research, Mark Sadoski, Ernest Goetz, and colleagues have published a number of interesting papers illustrating that concrete ideas are more understandable, memorable, and, as a side benefit, more interesting. See Mark Sadoski, Ernest T. Goetz, and Maximo Rodriguez, “Engaging Texts: Effects of Concreteness on Comprehensibility, Interest, and Recall in Four Text Types,” Journal of Educational Psychology 92 (2000): 85–95.

  Yale researcher Eric Havelock: E. A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963).

  Two professors from Georgia State University: Carol W. Springer and A. Faye Borthick, “Business Simulation to Stage Critical Thinking in Introductory Accounting: Rationale, Design, and Implementation,” Issues in Accounting Education 19 (2004): 277–303.

  Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes: The description of Jane Elliott’s antiprejudice simulation is taken from a PBS Frontline documentary, “A Class Divided.” It’s one of the most frequently requested programs in the station’s history, winning an Emmy for Outstanding Informational, Cultural, or Historical Programming in 1985. It can be seen on the Web at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ shows/divided/etc/view.html.

  Studies conducted ten and twenty years later: Phil Zimbardo, Psychology and Life, 12th ed. (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1985), 634.

  A researcher named Beth Bechky: B. A. Bechky, “Crossing Occupational

  Boundaries: Communication and Learning on a Production Floor,” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1999.

  The 727 must seat 131 passengers: Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (New York: HarperBusiness, 1994), 93.

  The Ferraris Go to Disney World: The Stone-Yamashita work with HP is based on Victoria Chang and Chip Heath, “Stone-Yamashita and PBS: A Case at the Graduate School of Business,” Stanford University Graduate School of Business case study SM119 (2004).

  Kaplan and Go Computers: This example is from a great book by Jerry Kaplan: Start-Up: A Silicon Valley Adventure (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995). It’s one of the best accounts we’ve read about the day-to-day uncertainty and struggle of being an entrepreneur and building a company. And it’s very funny.

  My audience seemed tense: Ibid., 25–26.

  Their investment valued: Kaplan’s company, later named Go Computers, ultimately failed because the technology of its time wasn’t sufficient to support pen-based computers. Nonetheless, the idea of pen-based computing was so sticky—the “pocketable radio” of its generation—that several other firms in addition to Kaplan’s arose and attracted venture capital dollars (and skilled engineering talent) to pursue the technology.

  Diarrhea is one of the leading killers: Message 1 of the Oral Rehydration Therapy Clinic is from PSI, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit organization that is doing innovative work on health for low-income populations. See www.psi.org/our_programs/products/ors.html.

  “Do you know”: Message 2 of the Oral Rehydration Therapy Clinic is by James Grant, who, during his time at UNICEF, made changes that have been credited with saving the lives of more than 25 million children. Vaccination rates increased, for example, from 20 percent to 80 percent. This remarkable story is told in David Bornstein, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). See for the quote.

  “Saddleback Sam” Rick Warren, The Purpose-Driven Church (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1995): 169. Warren’s book explains the organizing principles of one of the largest and fastest-growing churches in the country.

  4. Credible

  “simply didn’t have the demeanor”: Daniel Q. Haney, “News That Ulcers Are Caused by Bacteria Travels Slowly to MDs,” Buffalo News, February 11, 1996.

  “It tasted like swamp water”: Manveet Kaur, “Doctor Who Discovered ‘Ulcer Bugs,’” New Straits Times, August 13, 2002, 6.

  an important theme in modern medicine: Laura Beil, “A New Look at Old Ills: Research Finds Some Chronic Diseases May Be Infectious,” The Record (Northern New Jersey), March 24, 1997.

  But if we’re skeptical about: Naturally sticky ideas are a great source of insight about the process of persuasion, and researchers who study persuasion in psychology would benefit from studying them. Traditional studies of persuasion in psychology have sidestepped the issue of credibility by creating a bunch of arguments, having people rate them for credibility, then using the ones that are rated as having high or low credibility. With the exception of a number of studies on the impact of authority, researchers have avoided trying to understand what makes messages credible. Yet rumors and urban legends regularly evolve features that ascribe credibility to bizarre claims. The “testable credentials” idea that we discuss in the chapter, for example, has been a feature of dozens of urban legends, yet it has not been discussed by the research literature on persuasion.

  133 Around 1999, an e-mail message: The flesh-eating banana legend is discussed at www.snopes.com/medical/disease/bananas.asp.

  Pam Laffin, the Antiauthority: The story of Pam Laffin is described in Bella English, “Sharing a Life Gone Up in Smoke,” Boston Globe, September 20, 1998.

  “I started smoking to look older”: From the website of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, www.cdc.gov/tobacco/christy/myth1.htm.

  The Doe Fund sent a driver: We thank Spencer Robertson for this example.

  “acquire a good deal”: Jan Harold Brunvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981), 7. This book is largely responsible for creating the urban legends craze in the United States. For years, folklorists had been writing articles about the folklore of modern people, but this book by Brunvand was accessible enough that everyone started hearing about urban legends—and they were shocked to hear that different versions of their local stories were being told by everyone else in the nation.

  By making a claim tangible: There is a running debate in the psychology literature on the impact that vivid details have on memory and credibility. In our view, the evidence is confusing because researchers have not b
een careful about distinguishing details that support or distract from a core message. People inevitably focus on and remember vivid details. When the vivid details support the core message, it is more memorable and convincing, but irrelevant vivid details can also distract people from the core and make a message less memorable and convincing (thus the concern, in educational psychology, about “seductive details”). A good summary of the issues can be found in Ernest T. Goetz and Mark Sadoski, “Commentary: The Perils of Seduction: Distracting Details or Incomprehensible Abstractions?” Reading Research Quarterly 30 (1995), 500–11.

  In 1986, Jonathan Shedler and Melvin Manis: Jonathan Shedler and Melvin Manis, “Can the Availability Heuristic Explain Vividness Effects?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51 (1986), 26–36.

  “If, say, a soccer team”: The Covey example is from an excerpt from his book reprinted in Fortune, November 29, 2004, 162.

  A SHARK A DEER: We thank Tim O’Hara for the idea for the comparison in Message 2 of the Shark Attack Hysteria Clinic.

  Edible Fabrics: William McDonough, 2003 Conradin Von Gugelberg Memorial Lecture on the Environment, Stanford University, February 11, 2003; www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/2003_vongugelberg.shtml. See also Andrew Curry, “Green Machine,” U.S. News & World Report, August 5, 2002, 36.

  “The Emotional Tank”: “Emotional Tank” is from Jim Thompson, The Double-Goal Coach: Positive Coaching Tools for Honoring the Game and Developing Winners in Sports and Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). The exercise is described. This book is a must-read for anyone who coaches kids’ sports.

  But in the United States: The statistics in the Our Intuition Is Flawed Clinic about various causes of death are from the 2001 Statistical Abstract of the United States.

  A few weeks before the NBA: The NBA rookie orientation is described in a great article by Michelle Kaufman, “Making a Play for Players,” Miami Herald, October 5, 2003.

  At the NFL’s orientation: See Grant Wahl and L. Jon Wertheim, “Paternity Ward,” Sports Illustrated, May 4, 1998, 62.

  5. Emotional

  In 2004, some researchers at Carnegie Mellon: Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein, and Paul Slovic, “Can Insight Breed Callousness? The Impact of Learning About the Identifiable Victim Effect on Sympathy,” working paper, University of Pennsylvania, 2005.

  This chapter tackles the emotional component: This chapter focuses on the power of emotions to make people care, but research suggests that emotional ideas are also more memorable. Emotions increase memory for an event’s “gist or center.” Memory researchers talk about “weapon focus”—people who have been robbed or who have witnessed crimes often remember the perpetrator’s gun or knife with great clarity but remember little else (Reisberg and Heuer, below). People remember the central emotional theme of an event and other things that are closely related in space or causal structure. Thus, highlighting the emotional content of an idea may be one way to focus people on a core message. See Daniel Reisberg and Friderike Heuer, “Memory for Emotional Events” in Memory and Emotion, ed. Daniel Reisberg and Paula Hertel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  Mark Sadoski and colleagues have found that emotional aspects of texts are rated as more important (Sadoski, Goetz, and Kangiser, 1988) and are recalled much better (Sadoski and Quest, 1990). Interestingly, the latter article is among several research studies that have found that things are more emotional when they are easy to visualize. Making things concrete not only helps make them understandable, it makes them emotional and helps people care. Mark Sadoski and Z. Quest, “Reader Recall and Long-term Recall for Journalistic Text: The Roles of Imagery, Affect, and Importance,” Reading Research Quarterly 25 (1990), 256–72. Mark Sadoski, Ernest T. Goetz, and Suzanne Kangiser, “Imagination in Story Response: Relationships Between Imagery, Affect, and Structural Importance,” Reading Research Quarterly 23 (1988), 320–36.

  “We felt that [the Truth ads]”: “Smoke Signals,” LA Weekly, November 24–30, 2000 (also found at www.laweekly.com/ink/01/01/offbeat.php).

  American Journal of Public Health: The comparison of the “Truth” and “Think. Don’t Smoke” campaigns is in Matthew C. Farrelly, et al, “Getting to the Truth: Evaluating National Tobacco Countermarketing Campaigns,” American Journal of Public Health 92 (2002), 901–7.

  associating themselves with emotions: This principle has been well-known since Ivan Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for teaching dogs to salivate in response to a bell. A fun discussion of the power of association is found in the chapter on “Liking” in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (New York: Quill, 1993). Cialdini opens with the dilemma of the weatherman in a rainy city who regularly receives hate mail because viewers associate him with the news he delivers; he also discusses research on the “luncheon technique” that showed people were more likely to endorse political statements that they first heard while eating lunch. Cialdini’s book is the classic study on influence and one of the best books in the social sciences.

  “Rashomon can be seen as”: C. Vognar, “Japanese Film Legend Kurosawa Dies at 88,” Dallas Morning News, September 7, 1998, 1A.

  In 1929, Einstein protested: Einstein’s comments about the way people used the term relativity is from David Bodanis, E = mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation (New York: Walker & Company, 2000). Quotes are.

  Research conducted at Stanford and Yale: Chip Heath and Roger Gould, “Semantic Stretch in the Marketplace of Ideas,” working paper, Stanford University, 2005. In this paper, Chip and Roger also showed that extreme synonyms for the word good (e.g., fantastic or amazing) are increasing in use faster than synonyms that are less extreme (okay or pretty good), and that extreme synonyms for bad (awful versus bad) show the same pattern. Either semantic stretch is happening or the world is becoming simultaneously much better and much worse.

  175 Sportsmanship was once a powerful idea: Jim Thompson, The Double-Goal Coach: Positive Coaching Tools for Honoring the Game and Developing Winners in Sports and Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). Chapter 4 talks about the problems with sportsmanship and the idea of Honoring the Game.

  In 1925, John Caples: The classic book on mail-order advertising is John Caples, Tested Advertising Methods, 5th ed., revised by Fred E. Hahn (Paramus, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1997). Mail-order ads are frequently schlocky, but, as we say in the text, they’re one of the few places where advertisers get immediate, measurable feedback about what is and isn’t working. That means that there’s often a lot of wisdom to be gained in understanding why they look the way they do—someone has tested every attribute.

  Jerry Weissman, a former TV producer: Jerry Weissman, Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story (New York: Financial Times Prentice Hall, 2003). The quote is.

  “Don’t say, ‘People will enjoy’”: Caples/Hahn, Tested Advertising, 133.

  Cable TV in Tempe: W. Larry Gregory, Robert B. Cialdini, and Kathleen M. Carpenter, “Self-Relevant Scenarios as Mediators of Likelihood Estimates and Compliance: Does Imagining Make It So?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 43 (1982): 89–99.

  In 1954, a psychologist named Abraham Maslow: Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper, 1954).

  Subsequent research suggests that the hierarchical: See any introductory book in psychology. Every textbook author prints a picture of Maslow’s hierarchy because it’s a great graphic, then confesses that the hierarchical aspect of his theory didn’t quite work.

  Imagine that a company offers: The bonus and new job-framing studies are from Chip Heath, “On the Social Psychology of Agency Relationships: Lay Theories of Motivation Overemphasize Extrinsic Rewards,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 78 (1999): 25–62.

  Dining in Iraq: The Floyd Lee story is from a marvelous article by Julian E. Barnes, “A Culinary Oasis,” U.S. News & World Report, December 6, 2004, 28.

  The Popcorn Popper and Political Science: The popcorn popper story is from Caples
/Hahn, Tested Advertising, 71.

  When faced with affirmative action: Donald Kinder, “Opinion and Action in the Realm of Politics,” in Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. Daniel T. Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske, and Gardner Lindzey, 4th ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1988), 778–867. The extended quote is from.

  190 A related idea comes from James March: James March describes the two patterns of making decisions—consequence versus identity—in Chapters 1 and 2 of James G. March, A Primer on Decision Making (New York: Free Press, 1994). Economic analysis, in particular, assumes that all decisions are made on the basis of consequences, so it makes incorrect predictions in a number of arenas where identity is important; most economists would be surprised that the “Don’t Mess with Texas” campaign would work without imposing fines for littering.

  In a 1993 conference on “Algebra”: Message 1 in the Idea Clinic is from Joseph G. Rosenstein, Janet H. Caldwell, and Warren G. Crown, New Jersey Mathematics Curriculum Framework (New Jersey: New Jersey Department of Education, 1996).

  MESSAGE 3: Dean Sherman’s response and an extended discussion of this question among algebra teachers can be found at http://mathforum.org/t2t/thread.taco?thread=1739.

  Dan Syrek is the nation’s leading: Seth Kantor, “Don’t Mess With Texas Campaign Scores Direct Hit with Ruffian Litterers,” Austin American-Statesman, August 4, 1989, A1.

  “We call him Bubba”: Allyn Stone, “The Anti-Litter Campaign in Texas Worked Just Fine,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 28, 1988, A4.

  Too-Tall Jones steps toward: The Dallas Cowboys spot is described in Robert Reinhold, “Texas Is Taking a Swat at Litterbugs,” New York Times, December 14, 1986.

  The Department of Transportation originally: Marj Charlier, “Like Much in Life, Roadside Refuse Is Seasonally Adjusted,” The Wall Street Journal, August 3, 1989.