Made to Stick (28 page)

The outcome-simulators kept their focus on the desired future outcome: 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 repeating 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 dimension. Simulating past events is much more helpful than simulating 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’ advantage had grown wider. They were more likely to have taken specific action to solve their problems. They were more likely to have sought advice and support from others. They were more likely to report 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
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 modules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity. Brain scans show that when people
imagine
a flashing light, they activate the visual 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 moving 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 people 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, airplane travel, and others. Patients are introduced to a relaxation procedure 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 runway, sounding louder and louder …”). Each time the visualizations create anxiety, the person pauses for a moment and uses the relaxation 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.

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 potential 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 rehearsal 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 someone 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 picturing 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 competitive figure skaters improved their skating. Not surprisingly, mental 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 of the benefits of actual physical practice
.

The takeaway is simple: Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something, but it’s the next best thing. And, to circle back to the world of sticky ideas, what we’re suggesting is that the right kind of story is, effectively, a simulation. Stories are like flight simulators for the brain. Hearing the nurse’s heart-monitor story isn’t like being there, but it’s the next best thing.

Or think about the Xerox E053 code story. Why is hearing this story better than a warning about “misleading E053 indicators” in the training manual? It’s better for precisely the reason that flight simulators are better for pilots than stacks of instructional flash cards. The more that training simulates the actions we must take in the world, the more effective it will be.

A story is powerful because it provides the context missing from abstract prose. It’s back to the Velcro theory of memory, the idea that the more hooks we put into our ideas, the better they’ll stick. The E053 story builds in emotions—the frustration of failing to find the problem and being misled by the machine’s code. It builds in historical background—the idea that the recent change in the “XER board configuration” led to this new error. At the end, it delivers a kind of meta-level moral: You shouldn’t have complete faith in the error code. This “code skepticism” is something the repairmen can apply to every future job they undertake.

It’s easy for a doctor to treat appendicitis once it’s been diagnosed, but the problem is learning to distinguish an inflamed appendix from an upset stomach or food poisoning or an ulcer. Or think about beginning algebra students, who can solve complex equations but grind to a halt when they’re presented with a simple word problem that involves exactly the same math. Problem X doesn’t always identify itself as Problem X.

This is the role that stories play—putting knowledge into a framework that is more lifelike, more true to our day-to-day existence. More like a flight simulator. Being the audience for a story isn’t so passive, after all. Inside, we’re getting ready to act.

CLINIC

Dealing with Problem Students

THE SITUATION:
Professors have to deal with the occasional nuisance in class—an angry, aggressive, or challenging student. Many professors are caught by surprise and aren’t sure how to deal with the situation. In this Clinic we’ll compare two different messages that were intended to share strategies for coping with these students
.

• • •

MESSAGE 1:
The first message was produced by Indiana University as a resource for instructors.

• Remain calm. Slow down and regularize your breathing. Don’t become defensive.
  

• Don’t ignore them. Attempt to defuse their anger. Arrange to meet them during a break or after class. During the meeting, acknowledge the student’s emotions and listen. Talk in a professional and courteous manner.
  

COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 1:
Notice that there’s nothing unexpected here—nothing that is uncommon sense. (And if dealing with difficult students is common sense, then why do we need to publish tips for dealing with them?) Most of the advice—”Remain calm;” “Don’t become defensive;” “Attempt to defuse their anger”—is both too abstract and too obvious to stick. (Few teachers believe that you should
freak out
in response to a problem student.)

• • •

MESSAGE 2:
The second message was posted, informally, to a newsgroup by a professor named Alyson Buckman, who wanted to share her experience with other teachers in the group:

I had a student … who talked loudly and often in the back of the class, generally when I was speaking. I could hear his comments at the front of the room, and so could everyone else. He also disagreed with me on every point I made, no matter what it was. Students began very quickly to complain about his behavior in their journals and suggest methods, generally designed to humiliate, of dealing with him.

I tried several things from the beginning, but finally called he and his confidante in class up to the front at the end of class one day and scheduled appointments with me in my office. I made sure I had witnesses to these appointments as well—one of the perks of being in a shared office space. The confidante, I believe, had been trapped into that role—the other student just utilized his body as a means to disruption.

When I met with the bully, he came in with sunglasses on and a totally defiant behavior. I started with “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on in the back of the room …” and he responded, “I disagree with you.” I attempted to talk about this and met with silence.

It was not until I told him that other students were complaining and suggesting treatments for the situation that he listened. His body language totally changed as did his manner. I didn’t have a problem with him from then on. My basic understanding of this little teaching lesson was that students who display contempt for the teacher might very well be brought into check by other students. After all, he thought he was showing off for them and found that they didn’t want to hear or see it.

COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 2:
This story allows us to simulate the process of dealing with a problem student. We follow along with Buckman as
she works her way through the problem. Notice that many of the bulleted points from the first message are shown, rather than told, in the story. The professor attempts to “defuse” the student’s anger. She arranges “to talk with the student in a more private setting.” She stays calm throughout.

The solution—in essence, using peer pressure to get the student under control—is both concrete and unexpected. It’s uncommon sense. We might have expected a problem student not to care about what his peers thought. We empathize with Buckman, which makes us care about the outcome. It’s easier to care about a person than a list of bulleted instructions.

SCORECARD
Checklist	Message 1	Message 2
Simple	-	-
Unexpected	-
Concrete
Credible	-	-
Emotional	-
Story	-

PUNCH LINE:
A few stories like Professor Buckman’s—flight simulators for reining in problem students—would be much more interesting and effective in training professors than the list of bullet points in Message 1. This solution is not intuitive; nine out of ten training departments would create Message 1. We must fight the temptation to skip directly to the “tips” and leave out the story.