Contagious Why Things Catch On

Some things are chronically accessible:
 For an early paper on chronic accessibility, see Bargh, John
A., W. J. Lombardi, and E. Tory Higgins (1988), “Automaticity of Chronically Accessible
Constructs in Person X Situation Effects on Person Perception: It’s Just a Matter of Time,” 
Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology
55, no. 4, 599–605.
stimuli in the surrounding environment:
There is a huge literature on stimuli in the environment and
spreading activation, but for some classics, see Anderson, John R. (1983), 
The Architecture of
Cognition
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press); Collins, Allan M., and Elizabeth F.
Loftus (1975), “A Spreading-Activation Theory of Semantic Processing,” 
Psychological Review
82, no. 6, 407–28; and Higgins, Tory E., William S. Rholes, and Carl R. Jones (1977), “Category
Accessibility and Impression Formation,” 
Journal of Social Psychology
13 (March), 141–54. For
examples in a consumption context, see Nedungadi, P. (1990), “Recall and Consumer
Consideration Sets: Influencing Choice Without Altering Brand Evaluations,” 
Journal of
Consumer Research
17, no. 3, 263–76; and Berger, Jonah, and Gráinne M. Fitzsimons (2008),
“Dogs on the Street, Pumas on Your Feet: How Cues in the Environment Influence Product
Evaluation and Choice,” 
Journal of Marketing Research
45, no. 1, 1–14.
the candy company Mars:
 White, Michael (1997), “Toy Rover Sales Soar into Orbit: Mars Landing
Puts Gold Shine Back into Space Items,” 
Arizona Republic
, July 12A, E1.
Music researchers Adrian North:
 North, Adrian C., David J. Hargreaves, and Jennifer McKendrick
(1997), “In-Store Music Affects Product Choice,” 
Nature
390 (November), 132.

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Psychologist Gráinne Fitzsimons:
 Berger and Fitzsimons, “Dogs on the Street,” 1–14.
people possess core beliefs:
 Riker, William, and Peter Ordeshook (1968), “A Theory of the Calculus
of Voting,” 
American Political Science Review
62, no. 1, 25–42.
Arizona’s 2000 general election:
 Berger, Jonah, Marc Meredith, and S. Christian Wheeler (2008),
“Contextual Priming: Where People Vote Affects How They Vote,” 
Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences
105, no. 26, 8846–49.
Rebecca’s parents paid four thousand dollars:
Details about Rebecca Black came from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Black
.
Triggers boost word of mouth:
Also see Rosen, Emanuel (2003), 
Anatomy of Buzz
(London: Profile
Books), for a nice related discussion of triggers.
More frequently triggered products:
Berger, Jonah, and Eric Schwartz (2011), “What Drives
Immediate and Ongoing Word-of-Mouth?” 
Journal of Marketing
, October, 869–80.
analyzed hundreds of
 New York Times 
book reviews:
 Berger, Jonah, Alan T. Sorensen, and Scott J.
Rasmussen (2010), “Positive Effects of Negative Publicity: When Negative Reviews Increase
Sales,” 
Marketing Science
29, no. 5, 815–27.
the Kit Kat tune:
Details about Kit Kat’s history came from 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_Kat
.
Details about the coffee campaign came from an interview with Colleen Chorak on February 9,
2012.
one of the top ten “earworms”:
 Details about the “Give me a Break” song being an earworm came
from Kellaris, James (2003), “Dissecting Earworms: Further Evidence on the ‘Song-Stuck-in-Your
Head’ Phenomenon,” presentation to the Society for Consumer Psychology. See also
http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/news/20030227/songs-stick-in-everyones-head
.