Made to Stick (22 page)

A
few weeks before the NBA season begins, all the rookie players are required to meet in Tarrytown, New York, for a mandatory orientation session. They’re essentially locked in a hotel for six days: no pagers, no cell phones. The rookies are taught about life in the big leagues—everything from how to deal with the media to how to make sensible investments with their new riches.

One year, despite the secrecy surrounding the orientation, a group of female fans staked out the location. On the first night of the orientation, they were hanging out in the hotel bar and restaurant,
dressed to be noticed. The players were pleased by the attention. There was a lot of flirting, and the players made plans to meet up with some of the women later in the orientation.

The next morning, the rookies dutifully showed up for their session. They were surprised to see the female fans in front of the room. The women introduced themselves again, one by one. “Hi, I’m Sheila and I’m HIV positive.” “Hi, I’m Donna and I’m HIV positive.”

Suddenly the talk about AIDS clicked for the rookies. They saw how life could get out of control, how a single night could cause a lifetime of regret.

Contrast the NBA’s approach with the NFL’s approach. At the NFL’s orientation one year, league personnel had every rookie put a condom on a banana. No doubt eye-rolling was epidemic. Later, two women—former football groupies—talked about how they would try to seduce players, hoping to get pregnant. The women’s session was powerful—it was a well-designed message. But what’s more likely to stick with someone: hearing about someone who fooled someone else, or being fooled yourself?

H
ow do we get people to believe our ideas? We’ve got to find a source of credibility to draw on. Sometimes the wellsprings are dry, as Barry Marshall discovered in his quest to cure the ulcer. Drawing on external credibility didn’t work—the endorsement of his supervisors and his institution in Perth didn’t seem to be enough. Drawing on internal credibility didn’t work—his careful marshaling of data and detail still didn’t help him clear the bar. In the end, what he did was draw on the audience’s credibility—he essentially “modeled” a testable credential by gulping a glass of bacteria. The implicit challenge was: See for yourself—if you drink this gunk, you’ll get an ulcer, just like I did.

It’s not always obvious which wellspring of credibility we should
draw from. What Marshall showed so brilliantly was perseverance—knowing when it was time to draw on a different well. In this chapter we’ve seen that the most obvious sources of credibility—external validation and statistics—aren’t always the best. A few vivid details might be more persuasive than a barrage of statistics. An antiauthority might work better than an authority. A single story that passes the Sinatra Test might overcome a mountain of skepticism. It’s inspirational to know that a medical genius like Marshall had to climb over the same hurdles with his idea as we’ll have to climb with ours—and to see that he eventually prevailed, to the benefit of us all.

EMOTIONAL

M
other Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” In 2004, some researchers at Carnegie Mellon University decided to see whether most people act like Mother Teresa.

The researchers wanted to see how people responded to an opportunity to make a charitable contribution to an abstract cause versus a charitable contribution to a single person. They offered participants five dollars to complete a survey about their usage of various technology products. (The survey was irrelevant; the point was to ensure that the participants would have some cash on hand to consider donating to charity.)

When people finished the survey, they received their payment in five one-dollar bills. They also received, unexpectedly, an envelope and a charity-request letter giving them an opportunity to donate some of their money to Save the Children, a charity that focuses on the well-being of children worldwide.

The researchers tested two versions of the request letter. The first version featured statistics about the magnitude of the problems facing children in Africa, such as the following:

• Food shortages in Malawi are affecting more than 3 million children.
  

• In Zambia, severe rainfall deficits have resulted in a 42 percent drop in maize production from 2000. As a result, an estimated 3 million Zambians face hunger.
  

• Four million Angolans—one third of the population—have been forced to flee their homes.
  

• More than 11 million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance.
  

The other version of the letter gave information about a single young girl:

• Any money that you donate will go to Rokia, a seven-year-old girl from Mali, Africa. Rokia is desperately poor and faces the threat of severe hunger or even starvation. Her life will be changed for the better as a result of your financial gift. With your support, and the support of other caring sponsors, Save the Children will work with Rokia’s family and other members of the community to help feed and educate her and provide basic medical care and hygiene education.
  

The researchers gave participants one of the two different letters, then left them alone. They chose how much money, if any, to put back into the envelope, then they sealed the envelope and handed it back to a researcher.

On average, the people who read the statistics contributed $1.14. The people who read about Rokia contributed $2.38—more than twice as much. It seems that most people have something in common with Mother Teresa: When it comes to our hearts, one individual trumps the masses.

The researchers believed that the smaller donations for the statistical letter could be a result of what they called the “drop in the
bucket effect.” If people felt overwhelmed by the scale of the problem, their small donations might have seemed meaningless. But here’s where things get even more interesting. The researchers decided to give a third group of people
both
sets of information—the statistics and the story about Rokia. The researchers wondered whether people who got all the information would give more, on average, than the $2.38 that had been given by the Rokia group. Perhaps the combination of statistics and stories—the power of individual need coupled with the statistical scale of the problem—would inspire a whole new level of giving.

Nope. The people who received both letters gave $1.43, almost a dollar less than the people who got the Rokia story alone. Somehow the statistics—evidence of massive human suffering in Africa—actually made people less charitable. What was going on?

The researchers theorized that thinking about statistics shifts people into a more analytical frame of mind. When people think analytically, they’re less likely to think emotionally. And the researchers believed it was people’s emotional response to Rokia’s plight that led them to act.

To prove this argument, they ran a second study. In this study they primed some people to think in an analytical way by asking questions such as, “If an object travels at five feet per minute, then by your calculations how many feet will it travel in 360 seconds?” Other people were primed to think in terms of feelings: “Please write down one word to describe how you feel when you hear the word ‘baby.’”

Then both groups were given the Rokia letter. And, confirming the researchers’ theory, the analytically primed people gave less. When people were primed to
feel
before they read about Rokia, they gave $2.34, about the same as before. But when they were primed to
calculate
before they read about Rokia, they gave $1.26.

These results are shocking. The mere
act of calculation
reduced people’s charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.

• • •

I
n the last chapter, we discussed how to convince people that our ideas are credible, how to make them believe. Belief counts for a lot, but belief isn’t enough. For people to take action, they have to
care
.

Everyone believes there is tremendous human suffering in Africa; there’s no doubt about the facts. But belief does not necessarily make people care enough to act. Everyone believes that eating lots of fatty food leads to health problems; there’s no doubt about the facts. But the belief does not make people care enough to act.

Charities have long since figured out the Mother Teresa effect—they know that donors respond better to individuals than to abstract causes. You don’t give to “African poverty,” you sponsor a specific child. (In fact, the idea of sponsoring a child as a charitable hook dates back to the 1950s, when a young Christian minister encouraged Americans to sponsor needy Korean orphans.) The concept works with animals, too. At Farm Sanctuary, a nonprofit organization that fights to reduce cruel treatment of farm animals, donors can “adopt a chicken” ($10 per month), a goat ($25), or a cow ($50).

No one wants to donate to the General Administrative Fund of a charity. It’s easy to understand, intellectually, why general funds would be needed—someone’s got to buy the staples—but it’s hard to generate a lot of passion for office supplies.

Charities have learned how to arouse sympathy and compassion in donors—and thank goodness they’re good at it, because their skills ease a lot of suffering. But “making people care” isn’t something that only charities need to do. Managers have to make people care enough to work long and hard on complex tasks. Teachers have to make students care about literature. Activists have to make people care about city council initiatives.

This chapter tackles the emotional component of stickiness, but it’s not about pushing people’s emotional buttons, like some kind of
movie tearjerker. Rather, the goal of making messages “emotional” is to make people care. Feelings inspire people to act.

As an example, most teenagers believe that cigarette smoking is dangerous. There’s no credibility problem with that message. Yet teenagers still take up smoking. So how do you transform their belief into action? You have to make them care. And, in 1998, someone finally figured out how to do that.

The commercial starts with a shot of a city street in New York City. The footage is video, not film—it’s a bit dark, a bit unprofessional. It feels like a documentary, not a commercial. A caption flashes at the bottom of the screen: “Outside the headquarters of a major tobacco company.”

An eighteen-wheeler pulls up in front of the building, and a group of teenagers jump out. The teens begin to unload long white sacks marked “Body Bag.” They stack the bags on top of one another near the edge of the building. As the commercial progresses, the pile of body bags gets bigger and bigger. By the end of the ad, there are hundreds of bags in the pile. One of the teens shouts at the building through a megaphone, “Do you know how many people tobacco kills every day?” The daily death toll is revealed to be 1,800—the number of body bags the teens have piled up in front of the tobacco headquarters.

This ad is part of a series of ads called the Truth campaign. The campaign was launched by the American Legacy Foundation, which was formed in November 1998 after forty-six state attorneys-general settled a lawsuit against major U.S. tobacco companies.

You can’t watch the Truth ads without getting angry at tobacco companies. After the ads began airing, Philip Morris invoked a special Big Tobacco “anti-vilification” clause to have the spots yanked from the air. The tobacco companies inserted this clause in the settlements
of a number of antitobacco lawsuits; it gives them some veto power over how the settlement money can be spent on antismoking advertising. “We felt that [the Truth ads] are not consistent with the focus and mission of the American Legacy Foundation,” said Carolyn Levy, Philip Morris’s senior vice president for youth-smoking prevention, in reference to the censorship effort.

One translation of this complaint: The ads were working.

Meanwhile, another series of antismoking ads started to run. As part of the tobacco settlement, Philip Morris agreed to air its own series of antismoking ads. The Philip Morris tagline was “Think. Don’t Smoke.”

Two campaigns were launched, almost simultaneously, with two different approaches. This juxtaposition set up an exciting, head-to-head horse race in the marketplace of ideas. In fact, in June 2002, an article in the
American Journal of Public Health
surveyed 10,692 teenagers to compare the Truth campaign with “Think. Don’t Smoke.”

It turns out that some horses run better than others. When kids were asked to recall any antitobacco advertising they had seen, the Truth campaign was remembered spontaneously by 22 percent of them; the Think campaign by 3 percent. What’s particularly striking about this statistic is that when the kids were
prompted
with information from the campaigns, more than 70 percent of them remembered seeing
both
. In other words, teens had seen both ads on TV, but one stuck better than the other. Something about the Truth campaign was spontaneously memorable.