Wednesday, July 25, 2007

STANFORD Magazine: July/August 2007 > Farm Report > News > Chip Heath

STANFORD Magazine: July/August 2007 > Farm Report > News > Chip Heath

But there are ways to “sell” ideas, apart from their merits. That’s the essence of Heath’s course—and of the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Don’t (Random House) that he wrote with his brother, educational publisher Dan Heath.

While Dan drew on the methods of esteemed professional teachers, Chip and his students catalogued urban legends, wartime rumors, conspiracy theories, proverbs and even jokes, and conducted experiments with more than 1,700 subjects. They found that “sticky ideas shared certain traits”: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotional appeal and a story. Take the rumor dating back to the 1960s that some misanthrope put razor blades in Halloween apples. In 1985, an exhaustive study showed that the only recorded incidents of trick-or-treat tampering since 1958 were done to candy inside two families’ homes. Why does the myth persist? Because it entails a simple, concrete, surprising but plausible story that arouses emotion.

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