Made to Stick

Checklist
Message 1
Message 2
Simple
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Unexpected





(B-2 comparison)
(intro & 
comparison)
Concrete




Credible




Emotional
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Story
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P U N C H   L I N E :  
The best way to get people’s attention is to break their
existing schemas directly.
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KEEPING PEOPLE’S ATTENTION
T h e   M y s t e r y   o f   t h e   R i n g s
We began this chapter with two questions: How do we get people’s at-
tention? And how do we keep it? So far, most of our unexpected ideas
represent relatively simple, quick adjustments to a model. They may
be profound—as with Nora Ephron’s journalism teacher—but they
happen rapidly, so they only need to get people’s attention for a short
time. Sometimes, though, our messages are more complex. How do
we get people to stick with us through a more complex message? How
do we keep people’s attention?
A few years ago, Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona
State University, set out to improve the way he talked about science
in his writing and in his classes. For inspiration, he went to the li-
brary. He pulled down every book he could find in which scientists
were writing for an audience of nonscientists. He photocopied sec-
tions of prose that he liked. Later, flipping through his stack of copied
passages, he hunted for consistencies.
In passages that weren’t interesting, he found mostly what he ex-
pected. The purpose wasn’t clear, and the prose was too formal and rid-
dled with jargon. He also found a lot of predictable virtues in the good
passages: The structure was clear, the examples vivid, and the language
fluid. “But,” says Cialdini, “I also found something I had not expected—
the most successful of these pieces all began with a mystery story. The
authors described a state of affairs that seemed to make no sense and
then invited the reader into the material as a way of solving the mystery.”
One example that stuck in his mind was written by an astronomer,
who began with a puzzle:
How can we account for what is perhaps the most spectacular plan-
etary feature in our solar system, the rings of Saturn? There’s noth-
ing else like them. What are the rings of Saturn made of anyway?
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And then he deepened the mystery further by asking, “How
could three internationally acclaimed groups of scientists come to
wholly different conclusions on the answer?” One, at Cambridge
University, proclaimed they were gas; another group, at MIT, was
convinced they were made up of dust particles; while the third, at
Cal Tech, insisted they were comprised of ice crystals. How could
this be, after all, each group was looking at the same thing, right?
So, what was the answer?
The answer unfolded like the plot of a mystery. The teams of sci-
entists pursued promising leads, they hit dead ends, they chased
clues. Eventually, after many months of effort, there was a break-
through. Cialdini says, “Do you know what the answer was at the end
of twenty pages? Dust. Dust. Actually, ice-covered dust, which ac-
counts for some of the confusion. Now, I don’t care about dust, and
the makeup of the rings of Saturn is entirely irrelevant to my life. But
that writer had me turning pages like a speed-reader.”
Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need
for closure. “You’ve heard of the famous Aha! experience, right?” he
says. “Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is
preceded by the Huh? experience.”
By creating a mystery, the writer-astronomer made dust interest-
ing. He sustained attention, not just for the span of a punch line but
for the span of a twenty-page article dense with information on scien-
tific theories and experimentation.
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. In one lecture, though, the end-of-class bell
rang before he had time to reveal the solution. He says, “Normally
five to ten minutes before the scheduled end time, some students
start preparing to leave. You know the signals—pencils are put away,
notebooks folded, backpacks zipped up.” This time, though, the class
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was silent. “After the bell rang, no one moved. In fact, when I tried to
end the lecture without revealing the mystery, I was pelted with
protests.” He said he felt as if he’d discovered dynamite.
Cialdini believes that a major benefit of teaching using mysteries
is that “the process of resolving mysteries is remarkably similar to the
process of science.” So, by using mysteries, teachers don’t just
heighten students’ interest in the day’s material; they train them to
think like scientists.
Science doesn’t have a monopoly on mysteries. Mysteries exist
wherever there are questions without obvious answers. Why is it so
hard to get pandas at the zoo to breed? Why don’t customers like our
new product? What’s the best way to teach kids about fractions?
Notice what is happening here: We have now moved to a higher
level of unexpectedness. In the Nordstrom example, the Nordie sto-
ries had a punchy immediacy: Nordies warm up customers’ cars!
When you hear this, your past schema of customer service is called
up, contradicted, and refined, all in a short period of time. Mysteries
act differently. Mystery is created not from an unexpected moment
but from an unexpected journey. We know where we’re headed—we
want to solve the mystery—but we’re not sure how we’ll get there.
A schema violation is a onetime transaction. Boom, something
has changed. If we were told that the rings of Saturn were made of
dryer lint, a schema would be violated. We could call it “first-level”
unexpectedness. But the actual “rings of Saturn mystery” is more ex-
tended and subtle. We are told that scientists do not know what Sat-
urn’s rings are made of, and 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.
C u r i o s i t y   i n   H o l l y w o o d   S c r e e n p l a y s
Early in the movie Trading Places, Billy Ray Valentine (played by
Eddie Murphy), an apparently legless beggar, is using his arms to
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push himself around on a skateboardish contraption in a public park.
He begs for money from passersby and harasses an attractive woman
for a date. A couple of cops approach. As they jerk him up, his legs—
perfectly normal legs—are exposed. Valentine is a con artist.
Later in the movie, the Duke brothers—two elderly business-
men—intervene to get Valentine out of jail, persuading the cops to
release him into their custody. A couple of scenes later, Valentine ap-
pears, dressed in a three-piece suit, in a wood-paneled office. The
Duke brothers have turned him into a commodities trader.
Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru, uses this example to illus-
trate the concept of a “Turning Point.” McKee knows something about
how to hold an audience’s attention. His screenwriting seminars play
to packed auditoriums of aspiring screenwriters, who pay five hundred
dollars a head to listen to his thoughts. The Village Voice described his
course as “damned near indispensable not only for writers, but also for
actors, directors, reviewers, and garden-variety cinephiles.” His stu-
dents have written, directed, or produced television shows such as