Made to Stick

ers. You’ll notice the size difference! To use scientific language,
Wendy’s made a falsifiable claim. Any customer with a ruler and a
scale could have verified the claim’s truth value. (Though Wendy’s
advantage was sufficiently substantial that just eyeballing the differ-
ence was enough.)
This challenge—asking customers to test a claim for them-
selves—is a “testable credential.” Testable credentials can provide an
enormous credibility boost, since they essentially allow your audi-
ence members to “try before they buy.”
Te s t a b l e   C r e d e n t i a l s
Testable credentials have a colorful history in urban legends. In the
1990s, Snapple struggled to shake rumors that it supported the Ku
Klux Klan. Rumormongers thought they had a few pieces of “evi-
dence” on their side: “Look on any bottle of Snapple—there’s a pic-
ture of a slave ship on the front!” Doubters were also encouraged to
look for the strange symbol showing a K inside a circle—allegedly, 
evidence of the Klan’s ownership.
Sure enough, Snapple’s labels did feature a picture of a ship and a
K in a circle. They just had nothing to do with the Klan. The ship was
from an engraving of the Boston Tea Party. The circled K is a symbol
for “kosher.” But some uninformed people saw these symbols and
bought into the rumors.
Notice that the Snapple rumor provides a kind of bait-and-switch
version of “Where’s the Beef?” Wendy’s says, “See for yourself—our
burgers have more beef.” The Rumormongers say, “See for your-
self—there’s a circled K. Therefore Snapple supports the Ku Klux
Klan.” The validity of the see-for-yourself claim causes some people
C R E D I B L E
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to leap, illogically, to the rumormongers’ conclusion. This is how
testable credentials can backfire—the “see for yourself” step can be
valid, while the resulting conclusion can be entirely invalid.
Testable credentials are useful in many domains. For example,
take the question “Are you better off now than you were four years
ago?” Ronald Reagan famously posed this question to the audience
during his 1980 presidential debate with Jimmy Carter. Reagan
could have focused on statistics—the high inflation rate, the loss of
jobs, the rising interest rates. But instead of selling his case he de-
ferred to his audience.
Another example of testable credentials comes from Jim Thomp-
son, the founder of the Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA). The mis-
sion of the PCA is to emphasize that youth sports should not be about
winning at all costs; it should be about learning life lessons.
The PCA holds positive-coaching seminars for youth sports coaches.
At the seminars, trainers use the analogy of an “Emotional Tank” to get
coaches to think about the right ratio of praise, support, and critical
feedback. “The Emotional Tank is like the gas tank of an automobile. If
your car’s tank is empty, you can’t drive very far. If your Emotional Tank
is empty, you are not going to be able to perform at your best.”
After the Emotional Tank analogy is introduced, the trainers
begin an exercise. First, they ask the coaches to imagine that the per-
son next to them has just flubbed a key play in the game. The coaches
are challenged to say something to the person to drain his Emotional
Tank. Since clever put-downs are a staple of many sports interactions,
this exercise is embraced with noticeable enthusiasm. Thompson
says, “The room fills with laughter as coaches get into the exercise,
sometimes with great creativity.”
Then the coaches are asked to imagine that someone else has
made the same mistake, but now they’re in charge of filling that per-
son’s Emotional Tank instead of draining it. This generates a more
muted response. Thompson says, “The room often gets very quiet,
and you finally hear a feeble, ‘Nice try!’ ”
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M A D E   T O   S T I C K

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Observing their own behavior, the coaches learn the lesson—how
they found it easier to criticize than to support, to think of ten clever
insults rather than a single consolation. Thompson found a way to
transform his point into a testable credential, something the coaches
could experience for themselves.
O u r   I n t u i t i o n   I s   F l a w e d ,  
b u t   W h o   Wa n t s   t o   B e l i e v e   T h a t ?
T H E   S I T UAT I O N: