Made to Stick

worthiness of our sources, not their status, that allows them to act as au-
thorities. Sometimes antiauthorities are even better than authorities.
T h e   Po w e r   o f   D e t a i l s
We don’t always have an external authority who can vouch for our
message; most of the time our messages have to vouch for themselves.
They must have “internal credibility.” Of course, internal credibility
frequently depends on what topic we’re discussing: A credible math
proof looks different from a credible movie review. But, surprisingly,
there are some general principles for establishing internal credibility.
To see these principles in action, we can again turn to urban legends.
The Boyfriend’s Death is a famous urban legend that begins with
a couple heading out on a date in the boyfriend’s car. The car runs
out of gas under a tree on a deserted road. The girl suspects that the
guy is faking in order to make out with her, but soon she realizes
they’re really stuck. The boyfriend decides to walk to the nearest
house for help, and the girl stays behind. He has been gone for a long
time—it feels like hours—and the girl is frightened by a creepy
scratching coming from the roof of the car, possibly the scrapings of a
low-hanging tree branch. After several hours of anxious waiting, the
girl gets out of the car to discover—cue the horror music!—her
boyfriend, murdered and hanging from the tree above the car. His
toes scrape the roof as he swings in the wind.
When people pass this legend along, they always add particular
details. It’s always set in a specific location, which varies when it is
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told in different parts of the country: “It happened right off Farm
Road 121”; “It happened right on top of that bluff over Lake Travis.”
An expert on folk legends, Jan Brunvand, says that legends “acquire a
good deal of their credibility and effect from their localized details.”
A person’s knowledge of details is often a good proxy for her expert-
ise. Think of how a history buff can quickly establish her credibility by
telling an interesting Civil War anecdote. But concrete details don’t
just lend credibility to the authorities who provide them; they lend
credibility to the idea itself. The Civil War anecdote, with lots of inter-
esting details, is credible in anyone’s telling. By making a claim tangi-
ble and concrete, details make it seem more real, more believable.
J u r o r s   a n d   t h e   D a r t h   Va d e r   To o t h b r u s h
In 1986, Jonathan Shedler and Melvin Manis, researchers at the Uni-
versity of Michigan, created an experiment to simulate a trial. Sub-
jects were asked to play the role of jurors and were given the transcript
of a (fictitious) trial to read. The jurors were asked to assess the fitness
of a mother, Mrs. Johnson, and to decide whether her seven-year-old
son should remain in her care.
The transcript was constructed to be closely balanced: There were
eight arguments against Mrs. Johnson and eight arguments for Mrs.
Johnson. All the jurors heard the same arguments. The only difference
was the level of detail in those arguments. In one experimental group,
all the arguments that supported Mrs. Johnson had some vivid detail,
whereas the arguments against her had no extra details; they were pal-
lid by comparison. The other group heard the opposite combination.
As an example, one argument in Mrs. Johnson’s favor said: “Mrs.
Johnson sees to it that her child washes and brushes his teeth before
bedtime.” In the vivid form, the argument added a detail: “He uses a
Star Wars toothbrush that looks like Darth Vader.”
An argument against Mrs. Johnson was: “The child went to school
with a badly scraped arm which Mrs. Johnson had not cleaned or at-
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tended to. The school nurse had to clean the scrape.” The vivid form
added the detail that, as the nurse was cleaning the scrape, she spilled
Mercurochrome on herself, staining her uniform red.
The researchers carefully tested the arguments with and without
vivid details to ensure that they had the same perceived impor-
tance—the details were designed to be irrelevant to the judgment of
Mrs. Johnson’s worthiness. It mattered that Mrs. Johnson didn’t at-
tend to the scraped arm; it didn’t matter that the nurse’s uniform got
stained in the process.
But even though the details shouldn’t have mattered, they did. Ju-
rors who heard the favorable arguments with vivid details judged
Mrs. Johnson to be a more suitable parent (5.8 out of 10) than did ju-
rors who heard the unfavorable arguments with vivid details (4.3 out
of 10). The details had a big impact.
We can take comfort, perhaps, in the fact that the swing wasn’t
more dramatic. (If the mother’s fitness had dropped from eight to
two, we might have had to worry a bit about our justice system.) But
the jurors did make different judgments based on irrelevant vivid de-
tails. So why did the details make a difference? They boosted the
credibility of the argument. If I can mentally see the Darth Vader
toothbrush, it’s easier for me to picture the boy diligently brushing his
teeth in the bathroom, which in turn reinforces the notion that Mrs.
Johnson is a good mother.
W
hat we should learn from urban legends and the Mrs. Johnson
trial is that vivid details boost credibility. But what should also
be added is that we need to make use of truthful, core details. We
need to identify details that are as compelling and human as the
“Darth Vader toothbrush” but more meaningful—details that sym-
bolize and support our core idea.
In 2004, two Stanford Business School professors held a workshop
with arts organizations in Washington, D.C. One exercise was de-
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signed to make the arts leaders focus on the enduring principles of
their organizations, the principles they would not compromise under
any circumstances. One organization at the workshop was the Liz
Lerman Dance Exchange (LLDE), “a company of dance artists that
creates, performs, teaches, and engages people in making art.” At the
workshop, the leaders from the LLDE maintained that one of their
core values was “diversity.”
“Come on,” scoffed one of the professors, suspecting an exaggera-
tion. “Everyone claims that they value diversity, but you’re a dance
company. You’re probably filled with a bunch of twenty-five-year-old
dancers, all of them tall and thin. Some of them are probably people
of color, but is that diversity?” Other people in the audience, unfa-
miliar with the LLDE, nodded at this skeptical response.
Peter DiMuro, the artistic director of the LLDE, responded with an
example. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “the longest-term member of
our company is a seventy-three-year-old man named Thomas Dwyer.
He came to the LLDE after a full career working for the U.S. govern-
ment when he retired in 1988, and had no previous dance experience.
He has now been with the LLDE for seventeen years.”
This detail— seventy-three-year-old Thomas Dwyer—silenced the
skepticism in the room. The professors experienced a rare moment of
speechlessness.
And there was a good reason that DiMuro could respond quickly
with a vivid example. The reason is that diversity truly is a core value
at the LLDE. It’s part of the LLDE’s organizational DNA.
In 2002, Liz Lerman won a MacArthur “genius grant” for her
work creating modern dance involving communities throughout the
United States. In a dance project called Hallelujah/U.S.A., Lerman
visited communities across the country and asked residents what
made them thankful. Then she choreographed dances around those
themes of praise. The final performances featured members of the
local community: teenage female Hmong dancers in Minneapolis,
Border collie owners in Virginia, and a group of six card-playing
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ladies from Burlington, Vermont, who’d missed only two of their
weekly card games in forty years.
Now, a brief aside to the eye-rolling skeptics out there, to whom 
a modern dance performance sounds as appealing as being buried
alive: Whether or not you’d like to spend your weekends watching the
gyrations of Border collie owners, you’ve got to admit that the LLDE
is diverse. It’s real diversity, not workspeak diversity.
The example of Thomas Dwyer—the seventy-three-year-old for-
mer government employee—is a vivid, concrete symbol of a core or-
ganization value. It’s a symbol both to supporters and to the dancers
themselves. No one wants to participate in a “dance project” and be
the only balding, middle-aged guy on a stage full of Twiggys. The
LLDE’s claim that diversity was a core value gained credibility from
the details of Dwyer’s example, rather than from an external source.
B e y o n d   Wa r
The use of vivid details is one way to create internal credibility—to
weave sources of credibility into the idea itself. Another way is to use
statistics. Since grade school, we’ve been taught to support our argu-
ments with statistical evidence. But statistics tend to be eye-glazing.
How can we use them while still managing to engage our audience?
Geoff Ainscow and other leaders of the Beyond War movement in
the 1980s were determined to find a way to address the following par-
adox: When we see a child running with scissors, we wince. We shout
at her to stop. Yet when we read newspaper articles about nuclear
weapons—which have the power to destroy millions of children—it
provokes, at best, only a moment of dismay.
Beyond War was started by a group of citizens who were alarmed
by the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. At
this point, the combined Soviet and American nuclear arsenals were
sufficient to destroy the world multiple times. The Beyond War par-
ticipants went door-to-door in their neighborhoods, hoping to galva-
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nize a public outcry against the arms race. They struggled with the
problem of how to make credible their belief that the arms race was
out of control. How do you make clear to people the staggering de-
structive capability of the world’s nuclear stockpile? It’s so intangible,
so invisible. And yet telling stories, or providing details, seems inade-
quate: Grappling with the nuclear arms race requires us to grapple
with the scale of it. Scale relies on numbers.
Beyond War would arrange “house parties,” in which a host fam-
ily invited a group of friends and neighbors over, along with a Beyond
War representative to speak to them. Ainscow recounts a simple
demonstration that the group used in its presentations. He always car-
ried a metal bucket to the gatherings. At the appropriate point in the
presentation, he’d take a BB out of his pocket and drop it into the
empty bucket. The BB made a loud clatter as it ricocheted and set-
tled. Ainscow would say, “This is the Hiroshima bomb.” He then
spent a few minutes describing the devastation of the Hiroshima
bomb—the miles of flattened buildings, the tens of thousands killed
immediately, the larger number of people with burns or other long-
term health problems.
Next, he’d drop ten BBs into the bucket. The clatter was louder
and more chaotic. “This is the firepower of the missiles on one U.S. or
Soviet nuclear submarine,” he’d say.
Finally, he asked the attendees to close their eyes. He’d say, “This is
the world’s current arsenal of nuclear weapons.” Then he poured 5,000
BBs into the bucket (one for every nuclear warhead in the world). The
noise was startling, even terrifying. “The roar of the BBs went on and
on,” said Ainscow. “Afterward there was always dead silence.”
This approach is an ingenious way to convey a statistic. Let’s un-
pack it a bit. First, Beyond War had a core belief: “The public needs
to wake up and do something about the arms race.” Second, the
group’s members determined what was unexpected about the mes-
sage: Everyone knew that the world’s nuclear arsenal had grown since
World War II, but no one realized the scale of the growth. Third, they
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had a statistic to make their belief credible—i.e., that the world had
5,000 nuclear warheads when a single one was enough to decimate a
city. But the problem was that the number 5,000 means very little to
people. The trick was to make this large number meaningful.
The final twist was the demonstration—the bucket and the BBs,
which added a sensory dimension to an otherwise abstract concept.
Furthermore, the demonstration was carefully chosen—BBs are
weapons, and the sound of the BBs hitting the bucket was fittingly
threatening.
Notice something that may be counterintuitive: The statistic
didn’t stick. It couldn’t possibly stick. No one who saw the demon-
stration would remember, a week later, that there were 5,000 nuclear
warheads in the world.
What did stick was the sudden, visceral awareness of a huge dan-
ger—the massive scale-up from World War II’s limited atomic weaponry
to the present worldwide arsenal. It was irrelevant whether there were
4,135 nuclear warheads or 9,437. The point was to hit people in the gut
with the realization that this was a problem that was out of control.
This is the most important thing to remember about using statis-
tics effectively. Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves.
Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a rela-