Made to Stick

Psychologists define schema: Schemas are part of the standard tool kit of
cognitive and social psychology. For an interesting discussion of schemas in
social perception, see Chapters 4 and 5 of Susan T. Fiske and Shelley E. Tay-
lor, Social Cognition, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991). For an inter-
esting summary of cognitive psychology research on schemas, see Chapter 2
of David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of
Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995).
An analogy is a good way of helping people access the knowledge in a
schema. Educational psychologists have published a number of papers on
the value of analogies in learning new material, particularly Richard Mayer.
In a 1980 paper, he helped students learn to program the language of a data-
base. One group of students was given analogies for the structure of the com-
puter: “The long-term storage function of the computer was described as a
file cabinet; the sorting function was described as an in-basket, save basket,
and discard basket on an office desk.” When students were confronting easy
problems, the analogies didn’t matter much, but when the problems became
more complex, students who had been given analogies were about twice as
good as the others. See R. Mayer, “Elaborate Techniques That Increase the
Meaningfulness of Technical Text: An Experimental Test of the Learning
Strategy Hypothesis,” Journal of Educational Psychology 72 (1980): 770–84.
Metaphor is another way of allowing people to access the knowledge in a
schema. George Lakoff has, in a number of books, shown how deep
metaphors structure the way that we understand and talk about the world
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(e.g., George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980]). For example, we talk about and think of
love as a journey (Look at how far we’ve come. We’re at a crossroads. We’re off
track.) Lakoff has been better than anyone else at recognizing the pervasive
ways in which such metaphors affect our communication, but metaphors
need not be deep or pervasive to be useful in conveying a message; they just
need to be shared by the relevant audience, as in the discussion of “high con-
cept” in Hollywood.
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