Made to Stick (21 page)
Authors: Chip Heath
Another example of testable credentials comes from Jim Thompson, the founder of the Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA). The mission 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 person 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 person’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!’”
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.
CLINIC
Our Intuition Is Flawed,
but Who Wants to Believe That?
THE SITUATION:
People often trust their intuition, but our intuition is flawed by identifiable biases. Still, most people feel pretty good about their intuition, and it’s hard to convince them otherwise. This is the uphill battle faced by psychologists who study decision-making. Pretend that you’re the editor of an introductory psychology textbook, and you’re looking at two competing ways of explaining the concept of “availability bias.”
• • •
MESSAGE 1:
Get ready to make a few predictions. Which of the following events kill more people: Homicide or suicide? Floods or tuberculosis? Tornadoes or asthma? Take a second to think about your answers.
You might have thought that homicide, floods, and tornadoes are more common. People generally do. But in the United States there are 50 percent more deaths from suicide than from homicide, nine times more deaths from tuberculosis than from floods, and eighty times more deaths from asthma than from tornadoes.
So why do people predict badly? Because of the availability bias. The
availability bias
is a natural tendency that causes us, when estimating the probability of a particular event, to judge the event’s probability by its availability in our memory. We intuitively think that events are more likely when they are easier to remember. But often the things we remember are not an accurate summary of the world.
We may remember things better because they evoke more emotion, not because they are more frequent. We may remember things better because the media spend more time covering them (perhaps because they provide more vivid images), not because they are more common. The availability bias may lead our intuition astray, prompting us to treat unusual things as common and unlikely things as probable.
• • •
COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 1:
This passage uses a simple but effective testable credential: Which problem do
you
think kills more people? With any luck, readers will botch at least one of the predictions, thus illustrating for themselves the reality of the availability bias.
MESSAGE 2:
Here’s an alternative passage illustrating the availability bias that is more typical of introductory textbooks:
The
availability bias
is a natural tendency that causes us, when estimating the probability of a particular event, to judge the event’s probability by its availability in our memory. We intuitively think that events are more likely when they’re easier to remember. But often the things we remember are not an accurate summary of the world. For example, in a study by decision researchers at the University of Oregon, experimental participants thought that 20 percent more people died in homicides than in suicides, when the truth is that there are 50 percent more deaths from suicides. Subjects thought that more people
were killed by floods than tuberculosis, but nine times more people are killed by tuberculosis. Subjects believed that approximately as many people were killed by tornadoes as by asthma, but there are eighty times more deaths from asthma.
People remember things better because they evoke more emotion, not because they are more frequent. People remember things better because the media spend more time covering them (perhaps because they provide more vivid images), not because they are more common. The availability bias may lead our intuition astray, prompting us to treat unusual things as common and unlikely things as probable.
COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 2:
This is less involving. You could imagine a student reading the second paragraph—which gives away the punch line that asthma kills eighty times more people than tornadoes—and thinking,
Wow, those research participants were dumb
. It’s much more powerful to experience the effect for yourself.
| SCORECARD | ||
| Checklist | Message 1 | Message 2 |
| Simple |  | |
| Unexpected | | - |
| Concrete | | |
| Credible |  | |
| Emotional | - | - |
| Story | - | - |
PUNCH LINE:
Using testable credentials allows people to try out an idea for themselves.
Let’s shift to a different sports domain: the National Basketball Association. Imagine that it’s your job to educate incoming NBA rookies about the danger of AIDS. NBA players are young men—rookies are often under twenty-one. And they are sudden celebrities, with all the attention that goes with this new fame. They’ve heard about AIDS their entire lives, so the risk is not that they’re unaware of AIDS; the risk is that the circumstances of their lives prompt them to drop their guard for a night.
How do you make the threat of AIDS credible and immediate? Think through the possible sources of credibility. You could draw on external credibility—a celebrity/expert like Magic Johnson, or an antiauthority, such as an athlete in the terminal stages of AIDS. You could use statistics on a human scale (perhaps the odds of contracting AIDS from a single encounter with a stranger). You could use vivid details—an athlete could recount how his normal safe-sex vigilance was eroded by a particularly wild night of partying. Any of these could be quite effective. But what if you wanted to move the source of credibility inward, inside the heads of the players? The NBA came up with an ingenious way to do just that.