Made to stick: Why some ideas survive and others die. report 4

            In the next two chapters of the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, the authors explain two more aspects to making your ideas stickier. These two aspects are emotion and stories. Adding these two things two the rest of the book can help your ideas to stick.

            The authors go to explain what the word “emotion” means in the context of making one’s ideas more likely to stick: it means getting people to care for your idea or cause. The authors use a test done on several people to elaborate their message. The test subjects were separated into two groups and were given an irrelevant test and for their participation they were given five dollars in one dollar bills. Before they were able to leave they were given a brown envelope from a charity organization. Each group’s envelope was from the same charity but the way the message was delivered differed from the two groups. Group one’s message was presented with a lot of facts and statistics while the second group was given a picture of a little girl and an explanation how their money can help little children like her get food. The testers then averaged out each group’s own average of donations. Groups one’s average was $1.18 but group two’s average was $2.48. Once you get emotions involved in your message than your idea is more likely to stick and you’re more likely to get a better response from your audience. The authors then reference Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how this can help with getting people to care. He then uses an example to show how to use Maslow’s triangle to motivate or get people to care about something. A company wants to tell its employees that is offering a one thousand dollar bonus if they meet performance targets. In doing this the company hopes that this will increase worker productivity. There are three ways the company can present this; the first two involve spending that extra thousand dollars on some material object and saving it for future use. The third way is to tell its employees that this $1000 means that the company values you as an asset to the company and recognizes your job performance. Most people who answered this question picked the third way. By doing this a company positively affects the employee’s self-esteem which is higher on Maslow’s triangle than the physical reward promised in the first two ways.  But when asked the question in reverse; what do you think someone else would prefer to hear? Most people chose the first way. Many people feel that they are motivate by self-esteem while others are motivated by down payments. The third way invokes emotion into the employee while the other two are analytical and invoke little to no emotion (plus they are also pretty obvious) into the person which cause them to care less.

            The next aspect the authors talked about is using stories to get an idea to stick. The authors used examples to explain how stories surround a central idea that is easily sticks to the mind of the listener. In class we read an article about the nacirema people which talked about their strange culture with plenty of descriptive examples. Then after you read it you find out that this article is actually critiquing American culture (nacirema spelled backwards in American). The main idea of the article is that American culture is very strange once you take a step back from it and look at it from the outside.  The author covered his main idea in a story that stuck in the readers mind. This is a prime example that shows how an idea embedded in a story is a great way to transmit and idea.

            The authors show how these two stratagies can make people care about an idea and how to make an idea easy to listen to. Using emotion and stories and help make your ideas stick.