Did you know there’s a simple pattern that regularly predicts what ideas people will remember and which ones they won’t?

I’ll illustrate by example. Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? It’s a cognitive bias that says competent people underestimate their skills and incompetent people overestimate their skills. The Dunning-Kruger effect was discovered as early as 1999, but only came into the mainstream web cultural consciousness in late 2009. All of a sudden, boom: one mention appeared after another. What happened?

Some people might argue that it hit The Tipping Point, in Gladwell-speak. This is very plausible. “The Law of the Few”, “Context”, and “Stickiness” are the factors that determine the Tipping Point of a social-cultural epidemic. This article concentrates on ideas with “Stickiness”: ideas that are memorable are ideas that “stick”. Why does the Dunning-Kruger effect stick?

In the Heath brothers’ book Made to Stick, they claim that ideas that bear properties represented in the acronym SUCCESs become sticky: they are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and a Story. The stronger each attribute, the stickier the idea.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is…

Simple: incompetent people are overconfident, and competent people are too humble in their self-appraisal.

Unexpected: common sense would dictate that experienced people realize their strengths, and the incompetent should be aware of their weaknesses.

Concrete: it’s not just an abstract notion like “zeitgeist”, but instead something very real that we can experience in our everyday lives.

Credible: it was discovered by two researchers.

Emotion: hearing about it heals our self-esteem. Maybe we’re better than we give ourselves credit for! Indeed, not giving ourselves credit where credit is due is a cognitive error dismissed by Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy.

But it’s not a Story. Oh well. Alligators escaping into NYC sewers is a story, and that’s one reason it became such a sticky urban legend. However, the D-K effect is on Wikipedia, and in the digital age (where, I would guess, most of the conversation about the D-K effect is being held) linking someone to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect is similar to telling them a story. It’s definitely not the same thing, though, as storytelling is a human tradition that probably has some interesting properties entirely outside of my awareness.

To better understand what’s going on with these principles of stickiness, we should look at an important principle in psychology: the schema. A schema is a mental representation that sets the context for information. For example, 1+1 means nothing in and of itself, but within the schema of the number system, 1+1=2. So “simple” ideas are ones that are easily understood within the schema of the listener. If I told you that I jumped a foot in the air today, that would be simple and understandable. But if I told you that I jumped twelve feet in the air, you would need to understand a few other schemas before that information could fit into your reality. Otherwise, you would either ignore it (filtering it out) or it would be too complex, and you would struggle to pay attention. Richard Feynman used to make fun of mathematicians, saying things like “mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that’s proved is trivial”. Indeed, abstract math proofs often simply jump from one building block (or schema) to another.

Stepping back a bit, the only reason that many people struggle with advanced high school math is because they never really got the fundamentals down. In order to be good at Algebra 2, you have to really master “factoring”. In order to be good at factoring, it helps if you’ve mastered the times tables. In this way, schemas are like skills. Acquiring a new, more complex one often simply requires you to chain previously learned skills together. It’s worth pointing out for the purists among us that schemas can be independent of each other, and a “more advanced schema” (better model) may not necessarily be more complex, but instead, a radically different paradigm.

But if you’re an author communicating an idea, all that matters is that your concepts fit into your audience’s schema. If they don’t, you must begin your discussion within a familiar schema before gradually introducing more complex schemas. The “curse of knowledge” refers to the tendency for someone with an advanced understanding of an idea to no longer be able to identify with the schemas of a person whom he is addressing, leading to communication problems.

(Based on this, my personal theory is that in school, instead of being taught by experts, we should be taught by children slightly older than us (but guided by an older mentor to provide suggestions and resolve conflicts). We learn better from peers anyway. Eventually I’ll open up the Zachary Burt Elementary School of Excellence. I’ll train the boys in fighting and the girls in gossip techniques, and once time travel is invented we’ll destroy Plato’s Academy at T-ball.)

Schema dissonance, as I call it, is the same reason why an executive-type can say “our goal is to maximize shareholder value” and understand exactly what to do, but a front-line employee will have no idea how to put that into action. If you want to set good company values that can steer your employees in the right direction during times of ambiguity, make sure they fit into the employees’ schemas. Disney calls its park employees “cast members”. Can you smoke outside while you’re working? Well … if you’re an actor in a play, can you take your costume off while you’re on stage? No? Okay, there’s your answer.

Similarly, the language of a business’s website needs to fit into the schema of your prototypical customer. I used to blindly ignore all those ads at the airport about “ERP” until I learned more about how enterprise softare works. The ads didn’t fit into my schema. (This is fine, I’m not part of the target audience for the ads.) So, a good, simple idea will click with people’s schemas.

When our schemas are violated, it is unexpected, and we experience the emotion of surprise. When we experience the emotion of surprise, our eyes open wider so we can take in more information: we pay attention. And we better remember things that we pay full attention to. Makes sense that Sticky ideas are surprising, eh? If you violate a schema right away, this creates a curiosity “hook”, which is an uncomfortable tension in need of resolution. Most people are curious, so they will often pay attention for a long time, even for a minor intellectual payoff: it’s just a quirk in human nature.

Note: when our schemas are significantly jarred, we will often have trouble sleeping. I haven’t seen any research confirming this, but my suspicion is that it’s because our minds are racing through all the new implications and need to recalibrate.

Although some people are gifted with abstract reasoning skills, most people want to see concrete examples. The authors of Made to Stick actually recommend that teachers BEGIN with concrete examples, and then work back to the abstract concepts. So if you want an idea to “stick”, then you’re going to want to illustrate it with something that the listener can visualize in their head.

Sticky ideas are credible, but there are two types of credibility. One is external credibility, such as when they are endorsed by an expert, or a lot of people believe in it, lending credence through social proof. Check out “God” for an example of an idea with external credibility. The other type of credibility, though, is internal credibility. Also called “falsifiability”, this is when a listener can verify the idea for himself. The Dunning Kruger effect has internal credibility because someone can easily imagine people they know who are incompetent yet overconfident. This is called a “testable credential”. Wendy’s succeeded big-time with their “Where’s the beef?” campaign because people could go ahead and see for themselves that burgers had more beef.

A cool sticky idea is in the FedEx logo. Did you realize that there’s an arrow embedded in the FedEx logo?

Surprise!

It’s cool because you can go ahead and test it out for yourself, on the spot! Internal credibility.

The next important one is emotion. Emotional ideas and emotional events are more likely to be remembered. It’s like they’re stamped in color into your memory. Can you think of the last time you had a big crush? I bet you remembered each little detail of conversations you had with that person, and then proceeded to annoy the hell out of your friends when trying to perform micro-analysis of every facet. Your memory was so strong because the moment you had with the elusive heartbreaker was emotional. (Note how I just imbued my statement about the strength of emotional memories with internal credibility?)

The Heaths note that our emotional decisions are activated by self-interest when resulting with immediate, tangible, and significant consequences, but are more motivated by group goals when considering the long-term (my guess is there’s also probably a game theory explanation for this). For example, we might vote to impose a $500 fine on littering from the comfort of an air-conditioned voting booth, but on a hot and stressful day, it could be easily tempting to toss our water bottle on the street once we have our hands full. Dale Carnegie’s classic How To Win Friends and Influence People speaks to the same ideas: appeal to higher motives, speak to the other person’s interests.

We think with our hearts, and except in the long-term (because planning engages the prefrontal cortex), we don’t think with our brains. We make decisions on an emotional basis and then backwards rationalize them. So when we’re trying to prove a point to someone, we should make them feel, not think. You may think that statistical data is useful when trying to convince someone, but in fact, the best purpose of statistics is to illustrate a relationship, rather than get people to concentrate on actual numbers. Once people shift into an analytical frame of mind, they’re going to be less likely to act, more likely to question what you’re saying, and less likely to hand over the contents of their wallets to you. Keep them emotional! Men, this applies to dating, as well. If you are about to take a girl home and then you amateurishly shift the conversation to politics, she’s going to get analytical and then start reasoning why she shouldn’t go home with you. Similarly, know how it’s easy to neglect to put on a glove in the heat of the moment, even though you know it’s the right thing to do, and you swore that you’d never go raw dog again? We make emotional choices. We remember emotionally. If you want your idea (or your Saturday night) to be sticky, then be mindful of the emotional affect of your content.

Finally, stories offer a pre-packaged form for your idea to be retold. The other person doesn’t need to do any thinking or creative brainstorming, they can simply recycle your format and then offer a new twist of their own if they like. There may also be evolutionary reasons for stories to be better remembered: you can tell the story of Uncle Grunt who died when eating the poison berries.

Sticky ideas get people to:

1. Pay attention (via Unexpected surprise)
2. Understand & Remember (via Concrete examples)
3. Agree/believe (through Credibility)
4. Care (via Emotional resonance)
5. Be able to act on it (via a Simple Story to tell other people)

I like Made to Stick and it’s definitely going to influence the success and structure of my future blog posts, public speaking, rumor mongering (people are more likely to spread an outlandish claim..because it’s UNEXPECTED), and business marketing endeavors. You can get check it out on Amazon, here.

If you’re interested in learning more about schemas, this blog post is an awesome look at them in the context of rationalization (and other defense mechanisms) & cognitive dissonance.

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