Made to Stick

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.
195 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.
196 “We call him Bubba”: Allyn Stone, “The Anti-Litter Campaign in Texas
Worked Just Fine,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 28, 1988, A4.
197 Too-Tall Jones steps toward: The Dallas Cowboys spot is described in Rob-
ert Reinhold, “Texas Is Taking a Swat at Litterbugs,” New York Times, De-
cember 14, 1986.
198 The Department of Transportation originally: Marj Charlier, “Like Much
in Life, Roadside Refuse Is Seasonally Adjusted,” The Wall Street Journal, Au-
gust 3, 1989.
6. Stories
204 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.
206 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 ab-
stract 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. Re-
search 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 obvi-
ous 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
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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 ju-
rors voted to convict the defendant. When exactly the same information was
presented but the defense presented witnesses out of order and the prosecu-
tion presented witnesses in story order, 78 percent of the jurors voted to con-
vict. 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, “Ex-
planation-based Decision Making: Effects of Memory Structure on Judg-
ment,” 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 Persua-
siveness of Public Narratives,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79
(2000): 701–21.
207 The new XER board configuration: Julian E. Orr, Talking About Machines: