Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

This chapter argues that people are more likely to help an individual than contribute to a larger cause if that cause does not immediately concern them. Researchers have confirmed that people are more likely to donate to an individual in need than toward eradicating the cause of that person’s situation: Other people’s pain elicits emotions, whereas statistics elicit analytical thinking. In another experiment, the same researchers determined that solving a math problem before being asked to donate to a cause makes people contribute less money—when people are primed to think analytically, they feel less and care less.

The Heaths stress that making messages emotional is not about concocting “sob stories” but inspiring people to act. In the late 1990s, a teen antismoking ad called the “Truth Campaign” depicted teens piling body bags in front of a tobacco company to show how many people their products kill every day. It was wildly successful: It encouraged emotion by painting big tobacco companies as villains and tapped into teens’ rebellious spirit.

Sticky ideas can conjure emotions by tapping into existing schemas with emotional association. This process is called “semantic stretching” (173). In other words, new ideas can be associated with things people already care about to bring out their emotions.