Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Chapter 3 opens with Aesop’s fable of the fox and the grapes to illustrate how insights about human nature can spread across cultures and endure for millennia: The story’s profound message about failure and pettiness is made memorable through the use of concrete imagery—sour grapes and foxes. This chapter argues that abstraction makes it difficult to understand and remember ideas.

“The Nature Conservancy” shows how abstract language can prevent clarity. The Nature Conservancy is an organization that buys land to protect it from industrial development—a cause that is successful because it is easy to grasp. However, when the organization established a conservation easement program, which bought protection for the land rather than the land itself, it no longer had a tangible piece of land to show donors and employees. Their solution was to create tangibility by referring to the protected areas as “landscapes” rather than “acres.” To most donors, protecting “2 million acres of land per year” is much more abstract than protecting “5 critically important landscapes” (102).

Concrete language helps beginners understand a topic. This was put to test by Carol Springer and Faye Borthick, two professors of accounting at Georgia State University. Instead of teaching theory, they decided to use a hands-on approach where students acted as accountants for a fictional startup business. The long-term results of that class were conclusive: Students were more likely to major in accounting and even scored higher on exams two years later.

“The Velcro Theory of Memory” compares the process of ideas sticking to Velcro: The brain is full of small loops, so the more hooks an idea has, the better the connection. Concrete images, such as a childhood home, possess more hooks; brains also have more loops for them. Abstract concepts without logic, such as credit card numbers, lack both. “Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes” shows how elementary school teacher Jane Elliott used a concrete approach to teach her students about the abstract concepts of discrimination and prejudice. After dividing her class into kids with brown eyes and blue eyes, she spent a day praising one group and the next day the other group. Students reported feeling down and performing worse on the day they were shunned. Studies conducted decades later revealed that Elliott’s students were significantly less likely to be prejudiced than their peers. This exercise transformed an abstract concept into a tangible effect, thus creating long-lasting hooks in students’ minds about the idea of prejudice.

Concrete language is universal because it does not require expert knowledge to understand. For example, a consulting firm secured a partnership with Disney for Hewlett-Packard by demonstrating how HP products could improve an average family’s experience at Disney World without graphs or statistics. The exhibit made their core idea so tangible Disney employees could directly weigh the benefits of the partnership. Another example is Jerry Kaplan’s successful pitch for personal computers to Kleiner Perkins in 1987: Kaplan compared the size of the computer his employers planned to develop to a leather folder—a concrete visual representation that led interviewers to imagine this future device, transforming from passive listeners to active collaborators.

The idea clinic for Chapter 3 demonstrates how simple anecdotes and concrete imagery can make an abstract idea into a visceral one. For example, saying that over 1.5 million children die annually of diarrhea is too abstract to make the audience care. In contrast, declaring that a small packet of salt and sugar could cure hundreds of thousands of children for a negligible price creates an unforgettable image and provides an audience with a clear understanding of how to help.

Chapter 4 starts with the story of Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, medical researchers who first discovered the cause of ulcers: the bacteria H. pylori, which could be cured with antibiotics. Although their idea was brilliant, it did not immediately stick because the medical world questioned their legitimacy. To shore up their work, Marshall drank a glass filled with H. pylori to cause an ulcer in his own stomach, which he then cured with antibiotics. This demonstration garnered enough attention for the idea to eventually become accepted in the medical field.

Ideas need credibility to stick. Some untrue ideas, like urban legends, are naturally sticky because they are persuasive. Other ideas are not inherently credible and can only be made to stick through validation. This chapter explores different validation strategies.

One way to make ideas credible is to appeal to authorities like experts, celebrities, or aspirational figures. However, anti-authorities can become an alternate source of credibility. For example, Pam Laffin became an effective spokeswoman for the movement against smoking because she was a heavy smoker who experienced debilitating health problems caused by tobacco: Her credibility relied on her honesty and trustworthiness rather than medical expertise.

Another tactic is to make ideas internally credible. One way to do this is to make ideas “vouch for themselves” (137) via factual details. In “Jurors and the Darth Vader Toothbrush,” two researchers at the University of Michigan proved that arguments that include details seem more credible, even if those details are completely irrelevant to the point being made: Vivid details boost credibility. A second way to develop internal credibility is through statistics as long as they are used strategically and contextualized. In “The Human-Scale Principle,” a poll revealed deep employee unhappiness and a general lack of enthusiasm at a business. An analogy drove home the weight of the findings: If the business were a soccer team, “only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of 11 would care. Only 2 of the 11 would know what position they play […]. And all but 2 players would, in some way, be competing against their own team members rather than the opponent” (145). Providing human context lent credibility to the raw statistics.

A third way to boost internal credibility is by making it pass the Sinatra Test—having a single instance of success imparts enough credibility to validate all future ventures in a given domain. “Edible Fabrics” provides an example. When chemist Michael Braungart was hired by a Swiss textile manufacturer to reduce their use of toxic chemicals, Braungart managed to produce fabrics that were so clean the inspectors initially thought the factory equipment was broken—fabrics “safe enough to eat” (155). This success forever cemented Braungart’s credibility in the larger field of environmental protection. A final way to establish an idea’s credibility is to call upon the audience as the authority. A successful ad by fast-food chain Wendy’s promised that their burgers contained more meat than those of their competitors. This falsifiable claim (or testable credential) entices the audience to come try for themselves.

The two idea clinics for Chapter 4 highlight how statistics, if used incorrectly, can hurt a text’s credibility. In the first idea clinic, an article attempts to convince people that they should not be concerned about shark attacks by pointing out that people are “more likely to drown on a beach in an area protected by a lifeguard than […] to be attacked by a shark” (150). This analogy, though concrete, is not convincing: The audience might think drowning occurs regularly, even when there are lifeguards present, so the magnitude of the problem is not adequately shown. The second communiqué, in contrast, asks readers whether a deer or a shark is most likely to kill them. The answer—that deer are 300% more likely to cause human death (via car crash)—is as impactful as it is unexpected. This message is much more likely to ease fears of shark attacks.