Made to Stick

partners. It has built-in drama—a misleading code leads two men on
a wild goose chase until they uncover, through lots of work and
thought, that the problem is simpler than they initially thought. Why
is this story format more interesting? Because it allows his lunch part-
ners to play along. He’s giving them enough information so that they
can mentally test out how they would have handled the situation.
The people in the room who weren’t aware of the misleading E053
code have now had their “E053 schema” fixed. Before, there was only
one way to respond to an E053 code. Now, repairmen know to be
aware of the “misleading E053” scenario.
In other words, this story is part entertainment and part instruc-
tion. Shop talk conveys important clues about how to respond to the
world. It teaches nurses not to have blind faith in heart monitors. It
teaches copy repairmen to beware of the misleading E053 code.
But the stories above aren’t simply transferring nuggets of infor-
mation. The Xerox story is not functionally equivalent to an e-mail
sent around the company that contains the line “Watch out for false
E053 codes related to burned-out dicorotrons.” Something more pro-
found is happening here. It will take a bit of unpacking to reveal the
additional value that these stories bring.
T h e   U n - p a s s i v e   A u d i e n c e
Stories are strongly associated with entertainment—movies and
books and TV shows and magazines. When children say “Tell me a
story,” they’re begging for entertainment, not instruction.
Being the “audience” for a story seems like a passive role—
audiences who get their stories from television are called “couch po-
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tatoes,” after all. But “passive” may be overstating the case. When we
read books, we have the sensation of being drawn into the author’s
world. When friends tell us stories, we instinctively empathize. When
we watch movies, we identify with the protagonists.
But what if stories involve us in less intuitive, more dramatic
ways? One team of researchers has produced some exciting evidence
suggesting that the line between a story’s “audience” and a story’s
“protagonist” may be a bit blurry.
T
hree psychologists interested in how people come to understand
stories created a few for their study participants to read on a com-
puter. They divided the participants into two groups. The first group
read a story in which a critical object was associated with the main
character in the story—for instance, “John put on his sweatshirt be-
fore he went jogging.” The second group read a story in which the
same critical object was separated from the main character: “John
took off his sweatshirt before jogging.”
Two sentences later, the story threw in a reference to the sweat-
shirt, and the computer was able to track how long it took people to
read that sentence. Something strange happened: The people who
thought John had taken off his sweatshirt before the jog took more
time to read the sentence than the people who thought John had it on.
This result is subtle but fascinating. It implies that we create a
kind of geographic simulation of the stories we hear. It’s one thing to
say “Reading stories makes us see pictures in our head.” We’d all find
that statement intuitive. It’s quite another thing to say that when John
left his sweatshirt behind, he left it back at the house in a more re-
mote place in our heads. For that to be true, we cannot simply visual-
ize the story on a movie screen in our heads; we must somehow
simulate it, complete with some analogue (however loose) to the spa-
tial relationships described in the story. These studies suggest that
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there’s no such thing as a passive audience. When we hear a story, our
minds move from room to room. When we hear a story, we simulate
it. But what good is simulation?
A
group of UCLA students were asked to think about a current
problem in their lives, one that was “stressing them out” but was
potentially solvable in the future, such as a problem with schoolwork
or with a relationship.
The students were told that the goal of the experiment was to help
them deal with the problem effectively, and they got some brief in-
structions on problem-solving: “It is important to think about the
problem, learn more about it, think about what you can do, take steps
to deal with it. . . . Resolving it could reduce your stress, make you
feel pleased with how you dealt with it, and help you grow from the
experience.” After receiving these instructions, this “control group”
was sent home and asked to report back to the lab a week later.
A second group of students, the “event-simulation” group, were
kept in the lab. They were asked to mentally simulate how the prob-
lem had unfolded:
We would like you to visualize how this problem arose. Visualize
the beginning of the problem, going over in detail the first inci-
dent. . . . Go over the incidents as they occurred step by step. Vi-
sualize the actions you took. Remember what you said, what you
did. Visualize the environment, who was around, where you
were.
The event-simulation participants had to retrace, step by step, the
events that led to their problem. Presumably, reviewing the chain of
causation might help the students think about how to fix the prob-
lem, like programmers engaged in systematic debugging.
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A third group, the “outcome-simulation” group, was asked to
mentally simulate a positive outcome emerging from the problem:
Picture this problem beginning to resolve, you are coming out of
the stressful situation. . . . Picture the relief you feel. Visualize the
satisfaction you would feel at having dealt with the problem. Pic-
ture the confidence you feel in yourself, knowing that you have
dealt successfully with the problem.
The outcome-simulators kept their focus on the desired future out-
come: What will it be like once this problem is behind me?
After this initial exercise, both of the simulation groups were sent
home. Both groups were asked to spend five minutes every day re-
peating their simulations, and to report back to the lab a week later.
Now it’s play-at-home time: Make a quick prediction about which
group of students fared best in coping with their problems. (Hint: It’s
not the control group.)
Here’s the answer: The event-simulation group—the people who
simulated how the events unfolded—did better on almost every di-
mension. Simulating past events is much more helpful than simulat-
ing future outcomes. In fact, the gap between the groups opened up
immediately after the first session in the lab. By the first night, the
event-simulation people were already experiencing a positive mood
boost compared with the other two groups.
When the groups returned a week later, the event simulators’ ad-
vantage had grown wider. They were more likely to have taken spe-
cific action to solve their problems. They were more likely to have
sought advice and support from others. They were more likely to re-
port that they had learned something and grown.
You may find these results a bit counterintuitive, because the pop-
psychology literature is full of gurus urging you to visualize success. It
turns out that a positive mental attitude isn’t quite enough to get the
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job done. Maybe financial gurus shouldn’t be telling us to imagine
that we’re filthy rich; instead, they should be telling us to replay the
steps that led to our being poor.
W
hy does mental simulation work? It works because we can’t
imagine events or sequences without evoking the same mod-
ules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity. Brain scans
show that when people imagine a flashing light, they activate the vi-
sual area of the brain; when they imagine someone tapping on their
skin, they activate tactile areas of the brain. The activity of mental
simulation is not limited to the insides of our heads. People who
imagine words that start with b or p can’t resist subtle lip movements,
and people who imagine looking at the Eiffel Tower can’t resist mov-
ing their eyes upward. Mental simulation can even alter visceral
physical responses: When people drink water but imagine that it’s
lemon juice, they salivate more. Even more surprisingly, when peo-
ple drink lemon juice but imagine that it’s water, they salivate less.
Mental simulations help us manage emotions. There is a standard
treatment for phobias of various kinds—spiders, public speaking, air-
plane travel, and others. Patients are introduced to a relaxation pro-
cedure that inhibits anxiety, and then asked to visualize exposure to
the thing they fear. The first visualizations start at the periphery of the
fear. For example, someone who’s afraid of air travel might start by
thinking about the drive to the airport. The therapist leads the patient
through a series of visualizations that get closer and closer to the heart
of the fear (“Now the airplanes’ engines are revving up on the run-
way, sounding louder and louder . . .”). Each time the visualizations
create anxiety, the person pauses for a moment and uses the relax-
ation technique to restore equilibrium.
Notice that these visualizations focus on the events themselves—
the process, rather than the outcomes. No one has ever been cured of
a phobia by imagining how happy they’ll be when it’s gone.
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Mental simulation helps with problem-solving. Even in mundane
planning situations, mentally simulating an event helps us think of
things that we might otherwise have neglected. Imagining a trip to
the grocery store reminds us that we could drop off the dry cleaning at
the store in the same shopping center. Mental simulations help us
anticipate appropriate responses to future situations. Picturing a po-
tential argument with our boss, imagining what she will say, may lead
us to have the right words available when the time comes (and avoid
saying the wrong words). Research has suggested that mental re-
hearsal can prevent people from relapsing into bad habits such as
smoking, excessive drinking, or overeating. A man trying to kick a
drinking problem will be better off if he mentally rehearses how he
will handle Super Bowl Sunday: How should he respond when some-
one gets up for beers?
Perhaps most surprisingly, mental simulation can also build skills.
A review of thirty-five studies featuring 3,214 participants showed 
that mental practice alone—sitting quietly, without moving, and pic-
turing yourself performing a task successfully from start to finish—
improves performance significantly. The results were borne out over
a large number of tasks: Mental simulation helped people weld better
and throw darts better. Trombonists improved their playing, and com-
petitive figure skaters improved their skating. Not surprisingly, men-
tal practice is more effective when a task involves more mental
activity (e.g., trombone playing) as opposed to physical activity (e.g.,
balancing), but the magnitude of gains from mental practice is large
on average: Overall, mental practice alone produced about two thirds