Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Chip Heath

We may remember things better because they evoke more emotion, not because they are more frequent. We may remember things better because the media spend more time covering them (perhaps because they provide more vivid images), not because they are more common. The availability bias may lead our intuition astray, prompting us to treat unusual things as common and unlikely things as probable.

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.

Belief counts for a lot, but belief isn’t enough. For people to take action, they have to care.

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.

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.

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.

“Sportsmanship” had been stretched too far. Like “relativity,” it had migrated far afield from its original meaning.

The lesson for the rest of us is that if we want to make people care, we’ve got to tap into the things they care about. When everybody taps into the same thing, an arms race emerges. To avoid it, we’ve either got to shift onto new turf, as Thompson did, or find associations that are distinctive for our ideas.

And what matters to people? So far, we’ve dealt with associations, but there’s a more direct answer. In fact, it might be the most obvious answer of all. What matters to people? People matter to themselves. It will come as no surprise that one reliable way of making people care is by invoking self-interest.

If you’ve got self-interest on your side, don’t bury it. Don’t talk around it. Even subtle tweaks can make a difference. It’s important, Caples says, to keep the self in self-interest:

In 1954, a psychologist named Abraham Maslow surveyed the research in psychology about what motivates people. He boiled down volumes of existing research to a list of needs and desires that people try to fulfill: • Transcendence: help others realize their potential • Self-actualization: realize our own potential, self-fulfillment, peak experiences • Aesthetic: symmetry, order, beauty, balance • Learning: know, understand, mentally connect • Esteem: achieve, be competent, gain approval, independence, status • Belonging: love, family, friends, affection • Security: protection, safety, stability • Physical: hunger, thirst, bodily comfort

You may remember this list as Maslow’s Pyramid, or Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow’s list of needs was incredibly insightful, but he was wrong to describe it as a “hierarchy.” Maslow saw the hierarchy as a ladder—to be climbed rung by rung from the bottom up. You couldn’t fill your longing for Esteem until you satisfied your longing for Security. You couldn’t fill your Aesthetic needs until your Physical needs were taken care of. (In Maslow’s world, there were no starving artists.) Subsequent research suggests that the hierarchical aspect of Maslow’s theory is bogus—people pursue all of these needs pretty much simultaneously. There’s no question that most starving men would rather eat than transcend, but there’s an awful lot of overlap in the middle.

When people talk about “self-interest,” they’re typically invoking the Physical, Security, and Esteem layers. Sometimes Belonging gets acknowledged if the speaker is touchy-feely. Not many marketers or managers venture far beyond these categories. Even appeals that seem to fall under the Aesthetic cat...

Imagine that a company offers its employees a $1,000 bonus if they meet certain performance targets. There are three different ways of presenting the bonus to the employees: 1. Think of what that $1,000 means: a down payment on a new car or that new home improvement you’ve been wanting to make. 2. Think of the increased security of having that $1,000 in your bank account for a rainy day. 3. Think of what the $1,000 means: the company recognizes how important you are to its overall performance. It doesn’t spend money for nothing. When people are asked which positioning would appeal to them personally, most of them say No. 3. It’s good for the self-esteem—and, as for No. 1 and No. 2, isn’t it kind of obvious that $1,000 can be spent or saved? Most of us have no trouble at all visualizing ourselves spending $1,000. (It’s a bit less common to find people who like to visualize themselves saving.) Here’s the twist, though: When people are asked which is the best positioning for other people (not them), they rank No. 1 most fulfilling, followed by No. 2. That is, we are motivated by self-esteem, but others are motivated by down payments. This single insight explains almost everything about the way incentives are structured in most large organizations.

Or consider another version of the same task. Let’s say you’re trying to persuade someone to take a new job in a department that’s crucial to the company’s success. Here are three possible pitches for the new job: 1. Think about how much security this job provides. It’s so important that the company will always need someone in this job. 2. Think about the visibility provided by this job. Because the job is so important, a lot of people will be watching your performance. 3. Think about how rewarding it will be to work in such a central job. It offers a unique opportunity to learn how the company really works. The chasm between ourselves and others opens again. Most people say No. 3—an appeal to Learning—would be most motivating for them. Those same people predict that others would be most motivated by No. 1 (Security) and No. 2 (Esteem). In other words, a lot of us think everyone else is living in Maslow’s basement—we may have a penthouse apartment, but everyone else is living below. The result of spending too much time in Maslow’s basement is that we may overlook lots of opportunities to motivate people. It’s not that the “bottom floors”—or the more tangible, physical needs, to avoid the hierarchy metaphor—aren’t motivational. Of course they are. We all like to get bonuses and to have job security and to feel like we fit in. But to focus on these needs exclusively robs us of the chance to tap more profound motivations.

So far we’ve looked at three strategies for making people care: using associations (or avoiding associations, as the case may be), appealing to self-interest, and appealing to identity. All three strategies can be effective, but we’ve got to watch out for our old nemesis, the Curse of Knowledge, which can interfere with our ability to implement them.

This tactic of the “Three Whys” can be useful in bypassing the Curse of Knowledge. (Toyota actually has a “Five Whys” process for getting to the bottom of problems on its production line. Feel free to use as many “Whys” as you like.)

Asking “Why?” helps to remind us of the core values, the core principles, that underlie our ideas.

The story’s power, then, is twofold: It provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act). Note that both benefits, simulation and inspiration, are geared to generating action. In the last few chapters, we’ve seen that a credible idea makes people believe. An emotional idea makes people care. And in this chapter we’ll see that the right stories make people act.

Why does mental simulation work? It works because we can’t imagine events or sequences without evoking the same modules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity.

Mental simulation helps with problem-solving. Even in mundane planning situations, mentally simulating an event helps us think of things that we might otherwise have neglected.

Perhaps most surprisingly, mental simulation can also build skills. A review of thirty-five studies featuring 3,214 participants showed that mental practice alone—sitting quietly, without moving, and picturing yourself performing a task successfully from start to finish—improves performance significantly.

The takeaway is simple: Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something, but it’s the next best thing. And, to circle back to the world of sticky ideas, what we’re suggesting is that the right kind of story is, effectively, a simulation. Stories are like flight simulators for the brain. Hearing the nurse’s heart-monitor story isn’t like being there, but it’s the next best thing.

A story is powerful because it provides the context missing from abstract prose.

This story allows us to simulate the process of dealing with a problem student. We follow along with Buckman as she works her way through the problem. Notice that many of the bulleted points from the first message are shown, rather than told, in the story.

We must fight the temptation to skip directly to the “tips” and leave out the story.

Inspiration drives action, as does simulation.

Note how well the Jared story does on the SUCCESs checklist: • It’s simple: Eat subs and lose weight. (It may be oversimplified, frankly, since the meatball sub with extra mayo won’t help you lose weight.) • It’s unexpected: A guy lost a ton of weight by eating fast food! This story violates our schema of fast food, a schema that’s more consistent with the picture of a fat Jared than a skinny Jared. • It’s concrete: Think of the oversized pants, the massive loss of girth, the diet composed of particular sandwiches. It’s much more like an Aesop fable than an abstraction. • It’s credible: It has the same kind of antiauthority truthfulness that we saw with the Pam Laffin antismoking campaign. The guy who wore 60-inch pants is giving us diet advice!

• It’s emotional: We care more about an individual, Jared, than about a mass. And it taps into profound areas of Maslow’s hierarchy—it’s about a guy who reached his potential with the help of a sub shop. • It’s a story: Our protagonist overcomes big odds to triumph. It inspires the rest of us to do the same.

The Chicken Soup books traffic in inspirational stories—stories that uplift, motivate, energize. In that sense, these stories are the opposite of urban legends, which tend to reinforce a cynical, pessimistic, or paranoid view of the world.

What’s amazing about these stories is that the authors didn’t write them—they merely spotted and collected them. We wanted to understand what made these inspirational stories tick. We pored over inspirational stories—hundreds of stories, both from Chicken Soup and elsewhere—looking for underlying similarities.

Aristotle believed there were four primary dramatic plots: Simple Tragic, Simple Fortunate, Complex Tragic, and Complex Fortunate. Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru, lists twenty-five types of stories in his book: the modern epic, the disillusionment plot, and so on. When we finished sorting through a big pile of inspirational stories—a much narrower domain—we came to the conclusion that there are three basic plots: the Challenge plot, the Connection plot, and the Creativity plot. These three basic plots can be used to classify more than 80 percent of the stories that appear in the original Chicken Soup collection. Perhaps more surprisingly, they can also be used to classify more than 60 percent of the stories published by People magazine about people who aren’t celebrities. If an average person makes it into People, it’s usually because he or she has an inspiring story for the rest of us. If our goal is to energize and inspire others, these three plots are the right place to start. (By the way, if you’re a more jaded type of person who finds the Chicken Soup series treacly rather than inspirational, you’ll still find value in the three plot templates. You can always turn down the volume on the plots a bit.)

The story of David and Goliath is the classic Challenge plot. A protagonist overcomes a formidable challenge and succeeds.

There are variations of the Challenge plot that we all recognize: the underdog story, the rags-to-riches story, the triumph of sheer willpower over adversity.

Challenge plots are inspiring even when they’re much less dramatic and historical than these examples.

Challenge plots are inspiring in a defined way. They inspire us by appealing to our perseverance and courage. They make us want to work harder, take on new challenges, overcome obstacles. Somehow,

Today the phrase “good Samaritan” refers to someone who voluntarily helps others in times of distress. The original story of the Good Samaritan from the Bible is certainly consistent with this definition, but it’s even more profound.

This is what a Connection plot is all about. It’s a story about people who develop a relationship that bridges a gap—racial, class, ethnic, religious, demographic, or otherwise. The Connection plot doesn’t have to deal with life-and-death stakes, as does the Good Samaritan. The

All Connection plots inspire us in social ways. They make us want to help others, be more tolerant of others,

work with others, love others. The Connection plot is the most common kind of plot found in the Chicken Soup series. Where Challenge plots involve overcoming challenges, Connection plots are about our relationships with other people. If you’re telling a story at the company Christmas party, it’s probably best to use the Connection plot. If you’re telling a story at the kickoff party for a new project, go with the Challenge plot.

The third major type of inspirational story is the Creativity plot.

The Creativity plot involves someone making a mental breakthrough, solving a long-standing puzzle, or attacking a problem in an innovative way.

The goal here is to learn how to spot the stories that have potential.

A few years later, after Denning had left the World Bank, he devoted himself to spreading the lessons he’d learned about storytelling. In 2001, he wrote a very insightful book called The Springboard. Denning defines a springboard story as a story that lets people see how an existing problem might change. Springboard stories tell people about possibilities. One major advantage of springboard stories is that they combat skepticism and create buy-in. Denning says that the idea of telling stories initially violated his intuition. He had always believed in the value of being direct, and he worried that stories were too ambiguous, too peripheral, too anecdotal. He thought, “Why not spell out the message directly? Why go to the trouble and difficulty of trying to elicit the listener’s thinking indirectly, when it would be so much simpler if I come straight out in an abstract directive? Why not hit the listeners between the eyes?” The problem is that when you hit listeners between the eyes they respond by fighting back. The way you deliver a message to them is a cue to how they should react. If you make an argument, you’re implicitly asking them to evaluate your argument—judge it, debate it, criticize it—and then argue back, at least in their minds. But with a story, Denning argues, you engage the audience—you are involving people with the idea, asking them to participate with you. Denning talks about engaging the “little voice inside the head,” the voice that would normally debat...

barriers shifts the audience into a problem-solving mode.

But springboard stories go beyond having us problem-solve for the main character. A springboard story helps us problem-solve for ourselves. A springboard story is an exercise in mass customization—each audience member uses the story as a springboard to slightly different destinations.

The problem, of course, is that it’s impossible to transfer an edifice in a ninety-minute presentation. The best you can do is convey some building blocks. But you can’t pluck building blocks from the roof, which is exactly what you’re doing with a recommendation like “Keep the lines of communication open.”

Stories can almost single-handedly defeat the Curse of Knowledge. In fact, they naturally embody most of the SUCCESs framework. Stories are almost always Concrete. Most of them have Emotional and Unexpected elements. The hardest part of using stories effectively is making sure that they’re Simple—that they reflect your core message. It’s not enough to tell a great story; the story has to reflect your agenda. You don’t want a general lining up his troops before battle to tell a Connection plot story. Stories have the amazing dual power to simulate and to inspire. And most of the time we don’t even have to use much creativity to harness these powers—we just need to be ready to spot the good ones that life generates every day.

version of my message still core? In Chapter 1 (“Simple”), we discussed the importance of focusing on core messages—honing in on the most important truths that we need to communicate. If the world takes our ideas and changes them—or accepts some and discards others—all we need to decide is whether the mutated versions are still core. If they are—as with “It’s the economy, stupid”—then we should humbly embrace the audience’s judgment. Ultimately, the test of our success as idea creators isn’t whether people mimic our exact words, it’s whether we achieve our goals.

But let’s not forget that it’s just as effective to spot sticky ideas as it is to create them.