Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.
One sentence-summary: Some ideas influence their audience, making a mark on their memory for a long time and even making them act; whilst others are forgotten having hardly been heard. The authors study the ideas which do stick and explain their adhesion mechanisms.
By Chip Heath and Dan Heath, 2007, 285 pages.
Note: this book being also very comprehensive, I am publishing its summary in two parts. This is the first. I’m afraid this will be the case for many books in the Psychology & Communication section 
.
Summary of “Made to Stick”:
You will never guess what happened to one of my friends’ friend – Frank, not to name him. He was in Seattle for an important meeting with a client. Once the meeting over, as he still had time before catching his flight home, he went to a bar for a drink.
He had just finished his first glass when an attractive young woman came by and offered him a drink. Surprised, but nonetheless flattered, he accepted. She returned with two drinks. Thank you, he said, and took his first sip. After this, it was a total blackout.
When he woke up, comatose, he was lying in a hotel bathtub, his body covered in ice. He looked around him, panicked, trying to remember what he was doing there. His attention was then drawn to a small piece of paper:
DO NOT MOVE. PHONE 911.
There was a cellphone on a small table beside the bathtub. He struggled to reach, his fingers numbed with the cold, and dialed the emergency number.
At the other end of the line, the switchboard operator did not sound surprised. “Sir, could you please reach your arm behind your back? Can you feel something? A catheter in your lower back?”
Worried, he did as she asked. There was indeed a catheter.
“Do not panic, Sir, said the young lady. You have just had a kidney removed. You are the victim of an organ trafficking network wreaking havoc in the city. The ambulance is on its way.
Congratulations.
You have just read one of the most popular urban legends of the past fifteen years, which has gone round the Internet in every language and in many forms. A story easily remembered, a striking story, a story that sticks; albeit a completely fake story.
Let’s now look at an article published in the newsletter of a charity organization:
The communities’ make-up in the broader sense lends itself by nature to an equation of return on investment, which can be reproduced by referring to existing practices. [...] The fact that, in order to maintain transparency, the donor organizations often have to target or classify into categories the donated sums, is a factor limiting the flow of resources towards our organization.
Now, do something for ten minutes, anything, and then call a friend and tell him the two stories. Which one do you think you will remember the best? And which one will you be able to explain to your friend in simple terms?
An urban legend on the one hand, a few lines from an article out of context on the other: the comparison between the two is indeed biased. However, it perfectly demonstrates the two extremes of what the authors call “the scale of memorability”. And it also perfectly illustrates that some stories stick and others don’t.
We could be led to believe that some ideas are inherently interesting – a gang of organ thieves – and others inherently boring – the financial strategy of a charity organization. This is certainly partly true. But in this nature/nurture debate as applied to ideas, Chip Heath and Dan Heath gamble on nurture: ideas are made to be interesting rather than interesting by nature.
In 1992, Art Silverman, an employee of the Center for Science in the Public Interest – a non-profit making organization aimed at educating consumers in the field of nutrition – was contemplating a packet of popcorn.
He had just received the test results of popcorn packets collected at a dozen cinemas in three major American cities. Everyone had been surprised at the results: a bag contained on average 37 grams of saturated fat. The recommended maximum amount was 20 grams per day.
The coconut oil, which was used at the time, was to blame, as it was full of saturated fat.
Something had to be done. This bag, which could easily be eaten between meals, contained in itself almost two day’s worth of saturated fat. But how was the public going to be informed? For the majority, “37 grams of saturated fat” does not mean much. Is it good or bad? And even if it were bad, would it be “bad bad”, like tobacco, or “normal bad”, like a biscuit or a treat?
And of course, the phrase “37 grams of saturated fat” is boring enough to make the consumers run a mile. No one is turned on by saturated fat.
There were many means of transmitting the message to the public. But it had to be something extravagant to match the extravagance of this nutritional aberration. So the CSPI organized a press conference delivering this message:
An average portion of popcorn sold at a local cinema contains more dangerous fat for the arteries than a breakfast with bacon and eggs, lunch with a Big Mac and fries, and dinner with steak and all the trimmings – all in one!
And this message was reinforced with visuals. A table crammed with all these fatty foods. An entire day of unbalanced diet on a table; beside it, a bag of popcorn.
The story was a hit and got the honors of television channels. Very soon, the consumers stopped buying popcorn and cinemas, hand on heart, declared that they would no longer use coconut oil to make their popcorn. The idea had stuck.
Note: I did some research on this precise point and it appears that the opinions are far from being unanimous on the actual harm caused by coconut oil and the scientific value of the CSPI. As is often the case, it is hard to find a unanimous opinion concerning nutritional recommendations, as the experts and organizations do not agree with one other and individual interests are hidden and nebulous. For examples of articles against the CSPI or the noxiousness of coconut oil, see here or there.
Looking at the stories that stick and the ones that don’t, the Heath brothers set out to search for the common characteristics which could explain why some stories stick and others don’t, studying in particular hundreds of urban legends and widely spread proverbs.
They drew six determining principles from their research. In order for a story to stick, it requires:
- Simplicity. A great barrister claimed: “If you put forward ten arguments, even if they are relevant, the jury will have forgotten them all when they return to the deliberation room.” In order to be simple, an idea must be stripped down to its core, relentlessly excluding superfluous elements.
- The unexpected. In order to draw attention, intuitions must be challenged.
- Something practical. The ideas that naturally stick are full of concrete images. This is where business communication often stumbles.
- Credibility. If a Health Minister talks about a health problem, we are prepared to believe him. But we are not always given such a position of authority. Our ideas must therefore themselves bear their own letters of credit.
- Emotion. In order to inspire passion for our ideas, the audience or the readers have to feel something. We are made to feel things for individuals, not for abstractions.
- A story. Listening to a story or an anecdote is like a flight simulator, preparing us to react more quickly and more efficiently when a similar situation occurs.
Having read this list, you may think that these principles make sense. We all more or less know that we ought to “be simple” and “tell a story”. Do you know many soporific gibberish enthusiasts?
But if it were that simple, why are we not flooded with brilliantly designed sticking ideas?
Well, there’s a real baddie. Not Dark Vador, but a natural psychological tendency, which makes the application of these principles very difficult: the curse of knowledge.
In order to fully understand this principle, let’s look at a scientific study carried out in 1990 at Stanford University. It featured two groups of participants: “drummers” and “listeners”. The drummers were given 25 famous songs – such as The Star-Spangled Banner or Happy Birthday. They had to choose one and beat the tempo with their finger on a table to a listener. The listener had to guess which song it was.
The results were edifying: over the 120 songs played, the listeners identified on average 2.5%, i.e. 3 songs. But this is not what was edifying: before the drummers would play, they were asked to predict the success rate of the listeners: they estimated it to be 50%.
The drummers therefore managed to convey their message once in every 40 times, but thought they would manage it once every two times. Why?
They had knowledge the listeners did not have: the tune playing in their heads. For the listeners, the beats may as well have been Morse code, but for the drummers they accompanied the tempo of the music. And this knowledge made them almost impervious to the listeners’ incomprehension.
This is a perfect illustration of the curse of knowledge. You can try the experiment for yourself at home .
We will see this curse again in all the above principles detailed below. Follow the guide.
