Why would a university professor, of all people, warn students about the perils of knowing too much? There’s a reasonable explanation when it’s organizational behavior expert Chip Heath teaching a Graduate School of Business course called How to Make Ideas Stick. For years Heath, PhD ’91, has studied why some notions, however preposterous, gain wide acceptance while other concepts, even brilliant ones, fall flat. One of his conclusions is that often when the person explaining an idea is an expert, the “curse of knowledge” hampers the ability to engage others.
Here’s why: the more you know about something, the less readily you identify with those who know nothing about it, Heath says, and the less likely you are to “speak their language.” So specialists’ jargon can baffle those outside the field. “And they can’t just turn it off” when dealing with laypeople, he notes.
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.
And anyone with something to pitch—teachers, preachers, fund raisers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, politicians—can go and do likewise, the Heaths argue. They need only beware the curse of knowledge. Chip Heath cites the psychology experiments of Elizabeth Newton, PhD ’90, who had “tappers” drum out the rhythm of well-known songs to listeners, to see if they could identify the tunes. The tappers had predicted a success rate of 50 percent—but out of 120 songs, listeners guessed only 3.
Why did the tappers so overestimate their effectiveness? Tappers “have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge,” the authors write. (Try tapping a few bars of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Happy Birthday.”)
Their conclusion? There are two ways to beat the curse. “The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them.”
