Authors: Chip Heath
“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 = mc
2
: 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.
The nurse was working:
The story about the blue-black baby is found in Gary Klein,
Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 178–79.
stories make people act:
As in previous chapters, this chapter highlights one virtue of stories—encouraging action—but we could have discussed others. Stories also help people understand and remember. It’s hard to tell an abstract story, so stories inherit all the virtues of the Concrete, but they also serve as Simple (core and compact) ways of integrating lots of information. Research on jury decision-making shows that jurors rely heavily on stories to decide on their verdicts. Jurors confront masses of facts, presented in a scram
bled sequence with substantial gaps in the record, filtered through the obvious personal biases of witnesses. How do they deal with this complexity? It turns out they spontaneously construct a story (or stories) to account for this welter of information, then match their personal story with the stories told by the prosecution and the defense and choose whichever side tells a story that best matches their own. In one study in this area, Nancy Pennington and Reid Hastie showed that verdicts shifted depending on how easily jurors were able to construct a story, even when identical information was presented. When the defense presented evidence in the order of an unfolding story but the prosecution presented evidence out of story order, only 31 percent of jurors voted to convict the defendant. When exactly the same information was presented but the defense presented witnesses out of order and the prosecution presented witnesses in story order, 78 percent of the jurors voted to convict. Jurors felt most confident in their decision when both sides presented in story order; people like to understand both stories, to see the evidence clearly in their mind, and then decide. See Nancy Pennington and Reid Hastie, “Explanation-based Decision Making: Effects of Memory Structure on Judgment,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition
14 (1988): 521–33.
Stories also improve credibility. Researchers Melanie Green and Timothy Brock point out that attitudes formed by direct experience are more powerful, and stories give us the feeling of real experience. They show that people are more likely to be persuaded by a story when they are “transported” by it—when they feel more wrapped up in their mental simulation. See Melanie C. Green and Timothy C. Brock, “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
79 (2000): 701–21.
The new XER board configuration:
Julian E. Orr,
Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996). The dicorotron story is.
“John
put on
his sweatshirt”:
This study is among dozens of studies that support the importance of mental simulation. For a review, see Rolf A. Zwaan and Gabriel A. Radvansky, “Situation Models in Language Comprehension and Memory,”
Psychological Bulletin
123 (1998): 162–85. Not only do people mentally simulate space, they also simulate time. In a story about people entering a movie theater, respondents are more likely to recognize a reference to “the projectionist” if only ten minutes have elapsed in the story than if six hours have elapsed, even if both references are just a few sentences away on the page from the line about the movie theater.
210
no such thing as a passive audience:
The best overview of the “active reader” research is provided by Richard Gerrig, a researcher in the field. See
Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988). Gerrig says that Samuel Coleridge was wrong to describe our ability to appreciate stories as the “suspension of disbelief,” because his quote implies that the default state of humans is skeptical disbelief. In fact, the real state is the opposite. It’s
easy
to get wrapped up in a story; it’s
hard
to evaluate arguments skeptically, disbelieving them until they are proven. One of our favorite illustrations of the power of simulation is Gerrig’s research on stories with well-known endings. When people are in the middle of a story, they often get so wrapped up in the simulation that they momentarily act as though they’d forgotten an obvious ending. Watch out for that iceberg,
Titanic!
The UCLA study is by Inna D. Rivkin and Shelley E. Taylor, “The Effects of Mental Simulation on Coping with Controllable Stressful Events,”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
25 (1999): 1451–62.
Why does mental simulation work?:
The tapping, Eiffel Tower, lemon juice, and other examples are from Mark R. Dadds, Dana H. Bovbejerg, William H. Redd, and Tim R. H. Cutmore, “Imagery in Human Classical Conditioning,”
Psychological Bulletin
122 (1997): 89–103.
A review of thirty-five studies:
James E. Driskell, Carolyn Copper, and Aidan Moran, “Does Mental Practice Enhance Performance?”
Journal of Applied Psychology
79 (1994): 481–92.
Dealing with Problem Students:
Message 1 is from a tip sheet, “Tips for Dealing with Student Problem Behaviors,” from the Office for Professional Development, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. See
www.opd.iupui.edu/uploads/library/IDD/IDD6355.doc
. Message 2, by Alison Buckman, was originally posted to
http://research.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/disruptive_students2.html
.
When Fogle registered:
Ryan Coleman, “Indiana U. Senior Gains New Perspective on Life,”
Indiana Daily Student
, April 29, 1999. The Coad quotes are from David Kaplan, “A Losing Proposition: Jared Puts a Face to a Name for Subway Shops,”
Houston Chronicle
, January 23, 2002, D1.
In 1999, Subway’s sales:
Performance statistics for Subway, Schlotzky’s, and Quiznos are from Bob Sperber, “In Search of Fresh Ideas,”
Brandweek
, October 15, 2001, M54.
Blumkin is a Russian woman:
Rose Blumkin is described by Warren Buffett in his 1983 shareholder letter (see
www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1983.html
).
226
These three basic plots:
These results are from Chip’s research at Stanford. After studying urban legends for a while—stories that frequently specialize in creating negative emotions such as fear, anger, or disgust—he asked whether there were stories that circulated because they produced positive emotions. The
Chicken Soup for the Soul
stories were the obvious place to start. The research on the frequencies of the three plots was done by giving raters the classification system but no other information about the hypotheses of the research. Even though raters worked independently, pairs of raters who saw the same stories showed strong agreement on classifications.