Tag: memes

An awesome and quick read. I love that in some sense, they actually use their own advice when writing this to make some of their own ideas a bit more sticky. I thought this was a good little read and provides some interesting and very useful and actionable ideas. Definitely worth reviewing over some of the ideas in the near future for some writing I have in mind. I’d definitely recommend it to marketing people and communicators. I’d also love to delve further into some of their references.

Finally publishing this publicly with all the Highlights, Quotes, Marginalia, etc.

Reading Progress

• 12/28/17 marked as: want to read; “This seemed interesting in the library when I browsed by, so I picked it up. Seems a quick/easy read. Covers some interesting material related to ars memorativa which I may find interesting. They also make some references to schema within Hollywood, so that may be useful too.”
• 12/28/17 started reading
• 01/15/18 on page 69 of 291
• 01/16/18 on page 164 of 291
• 01/28/18 Finished book

Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia

Or is it possible to make a true, worthwhile idea circulate as effectively as this false idea?

How many times have I thought of this very topic?
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When we get advice on communicating, it often concerns our delivery: “Stand up straight, make eye contact, use appropriate hand gestures. Practice, practice, practice (but don’t sound canned).” Sometimes we get advice about structure “Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em. Tell ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em.” Or “Start by getting their attention–tell a joke or a story.”
Another genre concerns knowing your audience: “know what your listeners care about so you can tailor your communication to them.” And, finally, there’s the most common refrain in the realm of communication advice: Use repetition, repetition, repetition.

The common refrains, many of which can be useless.
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Which way will stick? And how do you know in advance?

This can be the holy grail of teaching…
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What makes urban legends so compelling? […] Why does virtually every society circulate a set of proverbs? Why do some political ideas circulate widely while others fall short?

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This book is a complement to The Tipping Point [by Malcolm Gladwell] in the sense that it will identify the traits that make ideas sticky, a subject that was beyond the scope of Gladwell’s book.

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Researchers discovered something shocking about the candy-tampering epidemic: It was a myth.

I’ve always suspected that this was the case but never saw any evidence or reportage that back up this common Halloween myth. In fact, I recall taking candy to local hospitals for radio-graphic exams.
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In other words, the best social science evidence reveals that taking candy from strangers is perfectly okay. It’s your family you should worry about.

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Both stories highlighted an unexpected danger in a common activity: eating Halloween candy and eating movie popcorn. Both stories called for simple action […] both made use of vivid, concrete images that cling easily to memory […] and both stories tapped into emotion: [fear… disgust…]

Many of these strike a cord from my memory training, which I suspect plays a tremendous part. Particularly the vividly clear and concrete details.
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There is no “formula” for a sticky idea–we don’t want to overstate the case. But sticky ideas do draw from a common set of traits, which make them more likely to succeed.

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… we an genetically engineer our players. We can create ideas with an eye to maximizing their stickiness.

This isn’t far from my idea of genetically engineering memes when I read Dawkins back in the day…
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1. Simplicity […] Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound.
2. Unexpectedness
3. Concretness […] because our brains are wired to remember concrete data.
4. Credibility
5. Emotions […] We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions.
6. Stories

[…] To summarize, here’s our checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. […] S.U.C.C.E.S.s

This seems to be the forthcoming core of the book.
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It’s not as though there’s a powerful constituency for overcomplicated, lifeless prose.

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Sadly, there is a villain in our story. The villain is a natural psychological tendency that consistently confounds our ability to create ideas using these principles. It’s called the Curse of Knowledge.

The example they give of the [music] Tappers and Listeners is great to illustrate the Curse of Knowledge.
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You can’t unlearn what you already know. There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them.

The JFK pitch to get a man on the moon was a great example here.
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They found that 89 percent of the award-winning ads could be classified into six basic categories, or templates. […] (For the other templates,
see the endnotes.) […] Amazingly, when the researchers tried to classify these “less successful” ads, they could classify only 2 percent of them [using the previous 6 categories]. […] It appears that there are indeed systematic ways to produce creative ideas.

This is some very interesting data. I should track this reference down. Particularly when they did the follow up of training groups in these methods (or not) and realizing that those with the templates did far better with minimal training.
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The [Army] plans often turn out to be useless.
“The trite expression we always use is No plan survives contact with the enemy,” says Colonel Tom Kolditz, the head of the behavioral sciences division at West Point.
“You may start off trying to fight your plan, but the enemy gets a vote. Unpredictable things happen–the weather changes, a key asset is destroyed, the enemy responds in a way you don’t expect.

aka Complexity…
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So, in the 1980’s the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander’s Intent (CI).

The way to plan around complexity to some extent.
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It’s hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. If we’re to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple. […]
What we mean by “simple” is finding the core of the idea. […] Finding the core is analogous to writing the Commander’s Intent.

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The French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery once offered a definition of engineering elegance: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

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Some interesting examples in the sections on “Finding the Core at Southwest Airlines”, “Burying the Lead”, “If you Say Three Things, You Don’t Say Anything.”, and “Decision Paralysis”
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Proverbs are simple yet profound. Cervantes defined proverbs as “short sentences drawn from long experience.”

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The first documented case in English is from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678. But the proverb may be much older still.

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J FKFB INAT OUP SNA SAI RS
vs
JFK FBI NATO UPS NASA IRS

Interesting example for both memory and a definition of information.
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How does complexity emerge from simplicity? We will argue that it is possible to create complexity through the artful use of simplicity.

This is how most would probably argue and it’s the magic behind complicated things like evolution.
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Schemas help us create complex messages from simple materials.

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A great way to avoid useless accuracy, and to dodge the Curse of Knowledge, is to use analogies. Analogies derive their power from schemas:
A pomelo is like a grapefruit. A good news story is structured like a pyramid.

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The high-concept pitches don’t always reference other movies. E.T., for instance, was pitched as “Lost alien befriends lonely boy to get home.”

I’m not sure of the background of the actual pitch, but a little massaging really makes E.T. the tried and true story of a boy and his dog, but this time the dog is an alien! So again, it really is an analogy to another prior film, namely Lassie!
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Good metaphors are “generative.” The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate “new perceptions,
explanations, and inventions.”

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Contrast Disney with Subway. Like Disney, Subway has created a metaphor for its frontline employees. They are “sandwich artists.” This metaphor is the evil twin of Disney’s “cast members.”

Evil twin indeed. There’s nothing artistic about their work at all.
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And if a well-designed message can make people applaud for a safety announcement there’s hope for all of us.

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Most of the time, though, we can’t demand attention; we must attract it.

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The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern. Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns. Consistent sensory timulation makes us tune out[…]

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Our brain is designed to be keenly aware of changes.

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This chapter focuses on two essential questions: How do I get people’s attention? And, just as crucially, How do I keep it?

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…we have to understand two essential emotions–surprise and interest–[…]

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And minivans deliver kids to soccer practice. No one dies, ever.

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Our schemas are like guessing machines. Schemas help us predict what will happen and, consequently , how we should make decisions.

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Emotions are elegantly tuned to help us deal with critical situations. They prepare us for different ways of acting and thinking.

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For instance, a secondary effect of being angry … is that we become more certain of our judgements. When we’re angry, we know we’re right, as anyone who has been in a relationship can attest.

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When our guessing machines fail, surprise grabs our attention so that we can repair them for the future.

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In a book called Unmasking the Face, Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen coined the term, “the surprise brow,” …

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When our brows go up, it widens our eyes and gives us a broader field of vision–the surprise brow is our body’s way of forcing us to see more.

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…when we’re angry our eyes narrow so we can focus on a known problem. In addition to making our eyebrows rise, surprise causes our jaws to drop and our mouths to gape. We’re struck momentarily speechless. Our bodies temporarily stop moving and our muscles go slack. It’s as though our bodies want to ensure that we’re not talking or moving when we ought to be taking in new information.

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Researchers who study conspiracy theories, for instance, have noted that many of them arise when people are grappling with unexpected events, such as when the young and attractive die suddenly. […] There tends to be less conspiratorial interest in the sudden deaths of ninety-year olds.

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What we see now is that surprise isn’t enough. We also need insight. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be “post-dictable.”

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So, a good process for making your ideas stickier is: (1) Identify the central message you need to communicate–find the core; (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message–i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isnt it already happening naturally? (3) Comjmunicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.

Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. […] It’s your job, as a communicator, to expose the parts of your message that are uncommon sense.

this could be done for the typical romantic ads about having a baby being a special time of life that’s cute and you don’t want to miss. really it’s traumatic and potentially life threatening and fragile. You HAVE to stop to re-adjust to your new life or you may end up losing your new precious someone (or worse, yourself.) Example is a California PSA ad that I heard on 3/13/18 on the radio.
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To make a message stick, you’ve got to push it beyond common sense to uncommon sense.

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“The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.‘”

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“But,” says [social psychologist Robert] Cialdini, “I also found something I had not expected–the most successful of these pieces [scientists writing for an audience of non-scientists] all began with a mystery story.”

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Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. […] Cialdini began to create mysteries in his own classroom, and the power of the approach quickly became clear. He would introduce the mystery at the start of class, return to it during the lecture, and reveal the answer at the end.

Sol Golomb used to do this with brain teasers at the start of class, presumably to catch the attention of bored students who could puzzle on it during class. I also suspected he used it to help identify creative thinkers and students smarter than their classwork might indicate.
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Mystery is created not from an unexpected moment but from an unexpected journey. […] A schema violation is a onetime transaction. […] We would call it “first-level” unexpectedness. […]we’re asked to follow on a journey whose ending is unpredictable. That’s second-level unexpectedness. In this way, we jump from fleeting surprise to enduring interest.

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[Robert] McKee says, “Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.” […] In McKee’s view, a great script is designed so that every scene is a Turning Point. “Each Turning Point hooks curiosity. the audience wonders, What will happen next? and How will it turn out?

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In 1994, George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University, provided the most comprehensive account of situational interest. It is surprisingly simple. Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.

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Pokemon cards cause kids to wonder, Which characters am I missing?

One important implication of the gap theory is that we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The trick to convincing people that they need our message, according to Loewenstein, is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they’re missing. We can pose a question or puzzle that confronts people with a gap in their knowledge. We can point out that someone else knows something that they don’t. We can present them with situations that have unknown resolutions, such as elections, sports events, or mysteries. We can challenge them to predict an outcome (which creates two knowledge gaps–What will happen? and Was I right?.

As an example, most local news programs run teaser ads for upcoming broadcasts. […] These are sensationalist examples of the gap theory. They work because they tease you with something tat you don’t know–in fact, something that you didn’t care about at all, until you found out that you didn’t know it.

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The improvement here is driven by structure, not content. Let’s face it, this is not a particularly interesting mystery.

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Research has shown that we are typically overconfident about how much we know.

The average participant failed to identify more than 70 percent of the best solutions identified by an expert panel. This failure is understandable; we wouldn’t expect any one person to be able to generate a database worth of solutions. However, when the individuals were asked to assess their own performance, they predicted that they had identified 75 percent. They thought they got the majority, but in reality they’d missed them.

He’s set up his own mystery here… What are the others? (ways to reduce demand for parking example)
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Eric Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard, came up with a pedagogical innovation known as “concept testing”. Every so often in his classes, Mazur will pose a conceptual question and then ask his students to vote publicly on the answer. The simple act of committing to an answer makes the students more engaged and more curious about the outcome.

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Overconfident people are more likely to recognize a knowledge gap when they realize that others disagree with the. Nancy Lowry and David Johnson [study] one grou, the discussion was led in a way that fostered a consensus. With the second group, the discussion was designed to produce disagreements about the right answer.

Students who achieved easy consensus were less interested in the topic, studied less, and were less likely to visit the library to get additional information.

think about this in terms of politics with the right versus the left and the effects on the public and news.
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Curiosity comes from gaps in our knowledge.

Example of ABC’s NCAA football games and Roone Arledge memo about setting the stage for games
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Here’s the idea Ibuka proposed to his team: a “pocketable radio.”

similar to Bill Gates’ “a computer on every desktop”
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Loewenstein, the author of the gap theory, says it’s important to remember that knowledge gaps are painful. “If people _like_ curiosity, why do they work to resolve it?” he asks.

Questions about biology early on pushed me personally…
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Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in different ways. Concreteness helps us to avoid these problems.

Not good for mathematics then is it?
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California is one of only five Mediterranean climate regions in the world. (The others are the fynbos of South Africa, the matorral of Chile, the kwongan of Australia, and, of course, the Mediterranean.

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How could TNC make the new strategy more concrete

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Here’s what the TNC did: Instead of talking in terms of land area, it talked about a “landscape.” … Five landscapes per year sounds more realistic than 2 million acres per year, and it’s much more concrete.

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Concreteness is an indespensable component of sticky ideas.

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Concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert.

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Teachers take an existing schema–the dynamics of a six person ball game–and overlay a new layer of abstraction. [Using stick figures to count up players.] The researchers called this style of questioning Computing in Context. It is pretty much the opposite of “rote recall.”

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What is it about concreteness that makes ideas stick? The answer lies with the nature of our memories.

this is exactly the underlying theory of the ars memorativa
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If the phrase, “Hey Jude” drew a blank, please exchange this book for a Beatles album. You’ll be happier.”

HA! What a great little aside here.
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great example here of a teacher who used blue/brown eyes to discriminate on students in a classroom and making them sit in the back of the room.
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Instead, Elliott [the teacher] turned prejudice into an _experience_. Think of the “hooks” involved: The sight of a friend suddenly snearing at you. The feel of a collar around your neck.

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But if concreteness is so powerful, why do we slip so easily into abstraction?

The reason is simple: because the difference between an expert and a novice is the ability to think abstractly. […] And here is where our classic villain, the Curse of Knowledge, inserts itself.

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…the moral of the story is to find a “universal language,” one that everyone speaks fluently. Inevitably, that universal language will be concrete.

think about the problem of the engineers talking with the manufacturers on the floor speaking a common language
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Imagine how much harder it would have been to build a 727 whose goal was to be “the best passenger plane in the world.” [compared to it must seat 131 passengers, fly nonstop from Miami to NYC and land on a short sub-1 mile runway.]

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“Almost everything we [Stone Yamashita Partners, a small consulting firm in San Francisco] do is visceral and visual,” Keith yamashita says. The “product” of most consulting firms is often a PowerPoint presentation. At Stone Yamashita, it’s much more likely to be a simulation, an event, or a creative installation.

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The presence of the portfolio made it easier for the venture capitalist to brainstorm, in the same what that focusing on “white things in our refrigerator” [versus white things in general] made it easier for us to brainstorm.

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…Studzinski learned that moms and their kids valued predictability. […] But Hamburger Helper had more than thirdy different flavors, and moms struggled to find their favorites among the massive grocery-store displays. […] “Moms saw new flavors as risky,” she says.

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By making Saddleback Sam and Samantha a living, breathing, concrete presence in the minds of the members of the Saddleback Church, the church has managed to reach 50,000 real Sams and Samanthas.

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Of the six traits of stickiness that we review in this book, concreteness is perhaps the easiest to embrace. It may also be the most effective of th traits.

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Ulcers are caused by bacteria. The researchers, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, identified a tiny spiral-shaped type of bacteria [Helicobacter pylori] as the culprit.

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The medical community expects important discoveries to come from Ph.D.s at research universities or professors at large, world-class medical centers. Internists do not cure diseases that affect 10 percent of the world’s population.

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Let’s pose the question in the broadest possible terms: What makes people believe ideas?

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When we think of authorities who can add credibility, we tend to think of two kinds of people. The first kind is the expert–the kind of person whose wall is covered with framed credentials. […] Celebrities and other aspirations figures make up the second class of “authorities.” […] Why do we care that Michael Jordan likes… ..We care because we want to be like Mike,… We trust the recommendations of people whom we want to be like.

This is why even horrible celebrity endorsements work for advertising.
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Can we find external sources of credibility taht don’t involve celebrities or experts? [Yes.] We can tape the credibility of anti-authorities.

example of Pam Laffin, the anti-smoking icon who had emphysema by 24 and used her personal story to show the vagaries of smoking.
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[Greg] Connolly [director of tobacco control for the Massachussetts Department of Public Health] said, “What we’ve learned from previous campaigns is that telling stories using real people is the most compelling way.”

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The takeaway is that it can be the _honesty and trustworthiness_ of our sources, not their _status_, that allows them to act as authorities. Sometimes antiauthorities are even better than authorities.

Take the teens of the Parkland Shootings in March 2018 as examples for moving the needle on the gun control debate.
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An expert on folk legends, Jan Brunvand, says that legends “acquire a good deal of their credibility and effect from their localized details.” A person’s knowledge of details is often a good proxy for her expertise. […] But concrete details don’t just lend credibility to the _authorities_ who provid them; they lend credibility to the idea itself. The Civil War anecdote, with lots of interesting details, is credible in _anyone’s_ telling. By making a claim tangible and concrete, details make it seem more real, more believable.

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In 1986, Jonathan Shedler and Melvin Manis […] created an experiment to simulat a trial. […] The jurors were asked to assess the fitness of a mother, Mrs. Johnson, and to decicd whether her seven-year-old son should remain in her care. […] So why did the details make a difference? They boosted the credibility of the argument. If I can mentally see the Darth Vader toothbrush, it’s easier for me to picture the boy diligently brushing his teeth in the bathroom, which in turn reinforces the notion that Mrs. Johnson is a good mother.

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…vivid details boost credibility. […] …we need to make use of truthful, core details. …details that symbolize and support our core idea.

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The use of vivid details is one way to create internal credibility–to weave sources of credibility into the ide aitself. Another way is to use statistics.

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“This approach is an ingenious way to convey a statistic.”

Talking about BB example: One BB: This is Hiroshima. Lot’s of BBs, this is the world’s stockpile (paraphrase)
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The point was to hit people in the gut with the realization that this was a problem that was out of control. […] Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.

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The soccer [team] analogy generates a human context for the statistics. it creates a sense of drama and a sense of movement. We can’t help but imagine the actions of the two players trying to score a goal, being opposed at every stage by the rest of their team. […] It relies on our schema of soccer teams and the fact that this schema is somehow cleaner, more well-defined, than our schema of organizations.

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Statistics aren’t inherently helpful; it’s the scale and context that make them so. […] The right scale changes everything.

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“A bag of popcorn has as much Vitamin J as 71 pounds of broccoli!” (We made this up.)

I like that they made it J to make it feel false if retold.
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When it comes to statistics, our best advice is to use them as input, not output. Use them to make up your mind on an issue.

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It’s the Sinatra Test: If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. [example of Safexpress delivering the Harry Potter books in India]

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For an example that unites all three of the “internal credibility” sources–details, statistics, and the Sinatra test–we can turn to Bill McDonough, an environmentalist know for helping companies improve both the environment and the bottom line.

selling chemical free fabric for Steelcase chairs
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Instead, the commercials developed a brand-new source of credibility: the audience. Wendy’s outsourced its credibility to customers. […] To use scientific language, Wendy’s made a falsifiable claim.

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[on examples: Snapple slave ship and circle K (Kosher) as a Klan ownership symbol] This is how testable credentials can backfire–the “see for yourself” step can be valid, while the resulting conclusion can be entirely invalid.

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It’s much more powerful to experience the effect for yourself.

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NBA aids example

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Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

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When people think analytically, they’re less like to think emotionally. […] The mere act of calculation reduced people’s charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.

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For people to take action, they have to care. […] Charities have long since figured out the Mother Teresa effect–they know that donors respond better to individuals than to abstract causes.

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The good news is that to make people care about our ideas we don’t have to produce emotion from an absence of emotion. In fact, many ideas use a sort of piggybacking strategy, associating themselves with emotions that already exist.

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Research conducted at Stanford and Yale shows that this process–exploiting terms and concepts for their emotional associations–is a common characteristic of communication. People tend to overuse any idea or concept that delivers an emotional kick. The research labeled this overuse “semantic stretch”.

related to why typefaces seem “old” after a while.
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“Unique” used to mean one of a kind. “Unique” was special. […] Over time, associations get overused and become diluted in value; people end up saying things like “This is really, truly unique.”

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One woman told Thompson that her high school basketball coach sad that if his players ever won a sportsmanship trophy, they’d have to run laps.

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The called it Honoring the Game.

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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.

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In 1925, John Caples was assigned to write a headline for an advertisement promoting the correspondence music course offered by the U.S. School of Music. Caples had no advertising experience, but he was a natural. He sat at his typeswriter and pecked out the most famous headline in print-advertising history: “They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano…But When I Started to Play!”

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Caples says companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits. […] The old advertising maxim says you’ve got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarte-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.

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We get uncomfortable looking at Caples’s handiwork: Many of his ads are shady. Deceptive. The Magnetic Personality Kit may enjoy a conscience-free existence, but most of us aspire to a working relationship with the truth.

Magnetic Personality Kit people are reminiscent of Donald J. Trump and his administration
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The first lesson is not to overlook self-interest. Jerry Weissman, a former TV producer and screenwriter who coaches CEOs in how to deliver speeches, says that you shouldn’t dance around the appeal to self-interest. He says that the WIIFY–“what’s in it for you,” pronounced wiffy-y–should be a central aspect of every speech.

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Teachers are all too familiar with the student refrain “How are we ever going to use this?” In other words, what’s in it for me?

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If you’ve got self-interest on your side, don’t bury it. Don’t talk around it.

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🔖

synopsis: 1982 psychologists persuasion study of homeowners. Being told about the benefits of cable vs. imagining how cable will improve your live.
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Go back and count up the number of times the word “you” appears in each appeal.

more in the second of imagining yourself….
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The Arizona study, though, took it a step further. It asked people to visualize the feeling of security they would get by using [the product].

This is just how the mnemotechniques work
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The research paper, when it was published, was subtitled “Does Imagining Make it So?” The answer was yes.

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Compared with a typical mail-order ad, the “imagine cable television” appeal is a much more subtle appeal to self-interest. […] This finding suggest that it may be the tangibility, rather than the magnitude, of the benefits that makes people care. You don’t have to promise riches and sex appeal and magnetic personalities. It may be enough to promise reasonable benefits that people can easily imagine themselves enjoying.

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Maslow’s Pyramid, or Maslow’s Heirarch of Needs.

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Subsequent research suggests that the hierarchical aspect of Maslow’s theory is bogus–people persue all of these needs pretty much simultaneously.

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He’s clear about his leadership mission: “As I see it, I am not just in charge of food service; I am in charge of Morale.”

Think about that: I am in charge of morale. In terms of Maslow’s hierarch, [Floyd] Lee is going for Transcendence.

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It’s the attitude that makes the difference. […] Lee realizes that serving food is a job, but improving morale is a mission. Improving morale involves a creativity and experimentation and mastery. Serving food involves a ladle.

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So, sometimes self-interest helps people care, and sometimes it backfires. What are we to make of this?

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1998, Donald Kinder, a professor of political science at University of Michigan, wrote an influential survey of thirty years of

This has the example of firefighters needing a payout of a popcorn popper to watch fire prevention video
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And perhaps the most important part of the story is this: “Group interest” is often a better predictor of political opinions than self-interest. Kinder says that in forming opinions people seem to ask not “What’s in it for me?” but rather, “What’s in it for my group?” Our group affiliation may be used based on race, class, religion, gender, region, political party, industry, or countless of other dimensions of difference.

and here’s where politics changed drastically in America after 1998
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A related idea comes from James March, a professor at Stanford University, who proposes that we use two basic models to make decisions. The first model involves calculating consequences. We weigh our alternatives, assessing the value of each one, and we choose the alternative that yields us the most value. This model is the standard view of decision-making in economics classes: People are self-interested and rational. [..] The second model is quite different. It assumes that people make decisions based on identity. They ask themselves three questions: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? And what do people like me do in this kind of situation?

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Instead, [Floyd Lee] helped create a kind of Pegasus identity: A Pegasus chef is in charge of morale, not food. You can imagine hundreds of decisions being made by staffers in the tent who think to themselves, What should a Pegasus person do in this situation?

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MATH IS MENTAL WEIGHT TRAINING. It is a means to an end, (for most people), not an end in itself.

And for those that don’t, they are mathematicians.
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🔖 example about litter in Texas: “Don’t Mess with Texas”

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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. …but we’ve got to watch out for our old nemesis, the Curse of Knowledge, which can interfere with our ability to implement them.

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One of the exercises was intended to help the leaders articulate and refine the core mission of their organization. The questions put to the attendees were difficult ones: Why does your organization exist? Can other organizations do what you do–and if so, what is it you do that is unique?

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The mission to “preserve duo piano music” was effective and meaningful inside Murray Dranoff, but outside the organization it was opaque.

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It’s easy to forget taht you’re the tapper and the world is the listener.

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By asking “Why?” three times, the duo piano group moved from talking about what they were doing to why they were doing it.

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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. […] Asking “Why?” helps to remind us of the core values, the core principles, that underly our ideas.

Put into wiki in IWC. Why webmention? Fundamental to the interconnection of the web and how it works. LINKS! {example of IDEO creating simulations that make people realize problems exist}
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simulations that drive employees to empathize with their customers.

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This realization–that empathy emerges from the particular rather than the pattern–bings us back full circle to the Mother Teresa quote… […] How can we make people care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities–not only to be the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be.

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Later, the group realized why the heart monitor misled them. It is designed to measure electrical activity, not actual heartbeats.

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The story about the baby appears in a chapter called “The Power of Stories,” in [Gary] Klein’s book Sources of Power. Klein says that, in the environments he studies, stories are told and retold because they contain wisdom. Stories are effective teaching tools. The show how context can mislead people to make the wrong decisions.

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The story’s power, then, is twofold: It provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act). […] An emotional idea makes people care. And in this chapter we’ll see that the right stories make people act.

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🔖 Shop Talk in the Xerox Lunchroom

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🔖 The Un-passive Audience

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Maybe financial gurus should be telling us to imagine that we’re filthy rich; instead, they should be telling us to replay the steps that led to our being poor.

what about Napoleon Hill’s popularity
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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.

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Mental simulations help us manage emotions.

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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. […] Not surprisingly, mental practice is more effective when a task involves more mental activity (e.g., trombone playing) as opposed to physical actiivty (e.g., balancing), but the magnitude of gains from mental practice alone produced about two-thirds of the benefits of actual physical practice.

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Stories are like flight simulators for the brain.

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The more that training simulates the actions we must take in the world, the more effective it will be.

What about math problems?
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We must fight the temptation to skip directly to the “tips” and leave out the story.

It’s also the value of the stories told in this very book! (Good to see them following their own advice.)
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And this is the second major payoff that stories provide: inspiration. Inspiration drives action, as does simulation.

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The national advertising director, who had a lifetime of experience in trying to make ideas stick, wanted to walk away from the Jared story.

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Jared reminds us that we don’t always have to create sticky ideas. Spotting them is often easier and more useful. What if history teachers were diligent about sharing teaching methods that worked brilliantly in teaching students?

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Just as there are ad templates that have been proven effective, so, too, there are story templates that have been proven effective. Learning the templates gives our spotting ability a huge boost.

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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 suprisingly, they can also be used to classify more than 60 percent of the stories published by People magazine about people who aren’t celebrities.

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The story of David and Goliath is the classic Challenge plot.

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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.

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That [the story of the Good Samaritan] 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.

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Where Challenge plots involve overcoming challenges, Connection plots are about our relationships with other people.

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The Creativity plot involves someone making a mental breakthrough, solving a long-standing puzzle, or attacking a proble in an innovative way. It’s the MacGyver plot.

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In the history of the [Ingersoll Rand] Grinder Team, this story has become known as the Drag Test. The Drag Test is a Creativity plot that reinforced the team’s new culture. The Drag Test [dragging material behind their cars instead of traditional lab tests] implied, “We still need to get the right data to make decisions. We just need to do it a lot quicker.”

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“How wonderful! They’ve stolen my idea. It’s become their idea!”

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In 2001, he [Stephen Denning] 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.

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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’r 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.

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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.

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🔖 example: Gary Klein taking stories out of a conference as an overview of what happened instead of pithy one-liners.

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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 makig sure that they’re Simple–that they reflect your core message. […] Stories hav ethe amazing dual power to simulate and inspire. And most of the time we don’t even have to use much crativity to harness these powers–we just need to be ready to spot the good ones that life generates every day.

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[In 1946, Leo] Durocher [coach of the Dodgers] pointed at the Giant’s dugout and said, “Nice guys! Look over there. Do you know a nicer guy than [Giant’s manager] Mel Ott? Or any of the other Giants? Why, they’re the nicest guys in the world! And where are thy? In seventh place!” As recounted by Ralph Keyes in his book on misquotations, Nice Guys Finish Seventh… [this quote] emerged as a cynical comment on life: “Nice guys finish last.”

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[Sherlock] Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

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…in making ideas stick, the audience gets a vote. The audience may change the meaning of your idea, as happened with Durocher. The audience may actually improve your idea, as was the case with Sherlock Holmes. O the audience may retain some of your ideas and jettison others, as with [James] Carville [,who used had three phrases: “It’s the economy, stupid”, “Change vs. more of the same” and “Don’t forget health care”, only one of which stuck.]

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Ultimately, the test of our success as idea creators isn’t whether people mimic our exact words, it’s whether we achieve our goals.

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The barrier to idea-spotting is that we tend to process anecdotes differently than abstractions.

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…we can also put on Core Idea Glasses, allowing us to filter incoming ideas from that perspective.

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If you’re a great spotter, you’ll always trump a great creator. Why? Because the world will always produce more great ideas than any single individual, even the most creative one.

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[Talking about Chip’s student exercise in class:] In the average one-minute speech, the typical student uses 2.5 statistics. Only one studen in ten tells a story. Those are the spaking statistics. The “remembering” statistics, on the other hand, are almost mirror image: When students are asked to recall the speeches, 63 percent remember the stories. Only 5 percent remember any individual statistic.

Furthermore, almost no correlation emerges between “speaking talent” and the ability to make ideas stick.

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The stars of stickiness are the students who made their case by telling stories or by tapping into emotion…

double entendre for this book as they’ve previously mentioned “tapping” out music….
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The first is decision paralysis–the anxiety and irrationality that can emerge from excessive choice or ambiguous situations. […] To beat decision paralysis, communicators have to do the hard work of finding the core.

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Getting a message across has two stages: The Answer stage and the Telling Others stage. In the Answers stage, you use your expertise to arrive at the idea that you want to share. Doctors study for a decade to be capable of giving the Answer. Business managers may deliberate for months to arrive at the Answer.

Here’s the rub: The same factors that worked to your advantage in the Answer stage will backfire on you during the Telling Others stage. To
get the Answer, you need expertise, but you can’t dissociate expertise from the Curse of Knowledge. You know things that others down’t know, and you can’t remember what it was like not to know those things. So when you get around to sharing the Answer, you’ll need to communicate as if your audience were you.

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There is a curious disconnect between the amount of time we invest in training people how to arrive at the Answer and the amout of time we invest in training them how to Tell Others. It’s easy to graduate from medical school or an MBA program without ever taking a class in communication. College professors take dozens of courses in their areas of expertise but none on how to teach. A lot of engineers would scoff at a training program about Telling Others.

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For an idea to stick, for it to be useful and lasting, it’s got to make the audience:
1. Pay attention UNEXPECTED
2. Understand and remember it CONCRETE
3. Agree/Believe CREDIBLE
4. Care EMOTIONAL
5. Be able to act on it STORY

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We’ve seen ideas related to newspapers, accounting, nuclear war, evangelism, seat belts, dust, dancing, litter, football, AIDS, shipping, and hamburgers.

And what we’ve seen is that all these ideas–profound and mundane, serious and silly–share common traits. […] They laughed when you
shared a story instead of a statistic. But when the idea stuck…

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All they had were ideas.

And that’s the great thing about the world of ideas–any of us, with the right insight and the right message, can make an idea stick.

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Guide to highlight colors

Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below
Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word
Green–Reference to read
Blue–Interesting Quote
Gray–Typography Problem
Red–Example to work through