Made to Stick

American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1981), 7. This book is largely responsible for creating the urban
legends craze in the United States. For years, folklorists had been writing arti-
cles about the folklore of modern people, but this book by Brunvand was ac-
cessible enough that everyone started hearing about urban legends—and
they were shocked to hear that different versions of their local stories were
being told by everyone else in the nation.
138 By making a claim tangible: There is a running debate in the psychology lit-
erature on the impact that vivid details have on memory and credibility. In
our view, the evidence is confusing because researchers have not been care-
ful about distinguishing details that support or distract from a core message.
People inevitably focus on and remember vivid details. When the vivid de-
tails support the core message, it is more memorable and convincing, but ir-
relevant vivid details can also distract people from the core and make a
message less memorable and convincing (thus the concern, in educational
psychology, about “seductive details”). A good summary of the issues can be
found in Ernest T. Goetz and Mark Sadoski, “Commentary: The Perils of Se-
duction: Distracting Details or Incomprehensible Abstractions?” Reading Re-
search Quarterly 30 (1995), 500–11.
138 In 1986, Jonathan Shedler and Melvin Manis: Jonathan Shedler and
Melvin Manis, “Can the Availability Heuristic Explain Vividness Effects?”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51 (1986), 26–36.
145 “If, say, a soccer team”: The Covey example is from an excerpt from his
book reprinted in Fortune, November 29, 2004, 162.
149 A SHARK A DEER: We thank Tim O’Hara for the idea for the comparison
in Message 2 of the Shark Attack Hysteria Clinic.
153 Edible Fabrics: William McDonough, 2003 Conradin Von Gugelberg
Memorial Lecture on the Environment, Stanford University, February 11,
2003; www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/2003_vongugelberg.shtml. See
also Andrew Curry, “Green Machine,” U.S. News & World Report, August 5,
2002, 36.
158 “The Emotional Tank”: “Emotional Tank” is from Jim Thompson, The
Double-Goal Coach: Positive Coaching Tools for Honoring the Game and De-
268
N O T E S

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veloping Winners in Sports and Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). The
exercise is described on page 63. This book is a must-read for anyone who
coaches kids’ sports.
159 But in the United States: The statistics in the Our Intuition Is Flawed Clinic
about various causes of death are from the 2001 Statistical Abstract of the
United States.
162 A few weeks before the NBA: The NBA rookie orientation is described in a
great article by Michelle Kaufman, “Making a Play for Players,” Miami Her-
ald, October 5, 2003.
163 At the NFL’s orientation: See Grant Wahl and L. Jon Wertheim, “Paternity
Ward,” Sports Illustrated, May 4, 1998, 62.
5. Emotional
165 In 2004, some researchers at Carnegie Mellon: Deborah A. Small, George
Loewenstein, and Paul Slovic, “Can Insight Breed Callousness? The Impact
of Learning About the Identifiable Victim Effect on Sympathy,” working
paper, University of Pennsylvania, 2005.
168 This chapter tackles the emotional component: This chapter focuses on
the power of emotions to make people care, but research suggests that emo-
tional ideas are also more memorable. Emotions increase memory for an
event’s “gist or center.” Memory researchers talk about “weapon focus”—
people who have been robbed or who have witnessed crimes often remember
the perpetrator’s gun or knife with great clarity but remember little else (Reis-
berg and Heuer, below). People remember the central emotional theme of
an event and other things that are closely related in space or causal structure.
Thus, highlighting the emotional content of an idea may be one way to focus
people on a core message. See Daniel Reisberg and Friderike Heuer, “Mem-
ory for Emotional Events” in Memory and Emotion, ed. Daniel Reisberg and
Paula Hertel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Mark Sadoski and colleagues have found that emotional aspects of texts are
rated as more important (Sadoski, Goetz, and Kangiser, 1988) and are re-
called much better (Sadoski and Quest, 1990). Interestingly, the latter article
is among several research studies that have found that things are more emo-
tional when they are easy to visualize. Making things concrete not only helps
make them understandable, it makes them emotional and helps people care.
Mark Sadoski and Z. Quest, “Reader Recall and Long-term Recall for Jour-
nalistic Text: The Roles of Imagery, Affect, and Importance,” Reading Re-