Communication

What Makes Some Ideas Hang Around

ILLUSTRATION BY JOEL HOLLAND

SHORTLY AFTER the World Trade Center terror, some Americans urged their family and friends to avoid shopping malls on Halloween. They forwarded an email allegedly authored by a friend of a woman whose Afghani boyfriend had skipped town but not before urging her to stay off airplanes on September 11 and out of malls on Halloween. The email listed the woman’s employer and work phone number to provide skeptics with a way to check the veracity of the story.

Psychologists know such stories thrive in situations of heightened anxiety, says GSB professor Chip Heath, a Stanford-trained psychologist, “but we have yet to explain why, in more normal times, people tell each other rumors and urban legends on a day-to-day basis.”

Take the stories of poison—or razor-blade-laced treats that have put a damper on Halloween night for two generations of children. Over more than three decades, researchers have been able to verify only two instances of tainted candy, and both of those were tampered with by the children’s family members. Or take the recurring legends about companies financing the Church of Satan or the Ku Klux Klan. Unlike many widespread commercial and political ideas, these bogus ones propagate without anyone funding an advertising campaign. Their success against the odds is why Heath studies them.

In a recent seminar for MBA students, Heath, an associate professor of organizational behavior, explained that urban legends often develop informational credentials, such as the phone number in the email legend above, that act as camouflage and make it harder for people to debunk them. In the Church of Satan rumor, Heath notes, skeptics in the ’70s were told that a “friend of a friend” had heard the CEO of Procter & Gamble confirm the rumor on the Donahue show. By the ’90s, the friend had heard the CEO on Oprah or Sally Jesse Raphael, and now the CEO was explaining why he would be crazy enough to risk losing customers by confirming this rumor on national television. “There simply aren’t enough Christians left to matter,” he is purported to have said, a twist that makes Christians angrier and even more likely to pass along the story.

Heath’s approach to this subject is guided by past research in folklore, sociology, and psychology, but also by an oft-repeated idea from Oliver Wendell Holmes. In a famous Supreme Court opinion in 1919, the chief justice used the metaphor of an economic marketplace to describe how ideas succeed or fail. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” Holmes wrote.

To date, Heath’s research casts doubt on the existence of a competitive marketplace of ideas, at least one in which truth wins out. Based on experiments he has conducted at Stanford and the University of Chicago, as well as research by others, Heath says: “People do care about the truth of an idea, but they also want to tell stories that produce strong emotion, and that second tendency sometimes gets in the way of the first.”

“If we could understand what kinds of stories succeed beyond all expectations, even when they are not true, we might be able to take legitimate information, about health for example, and change people’s behavior for the better,” Heath says. “Or if I were a business manager, I would love to have a mission statement for my organization that was as successful at moving through the organization as the most successful urban legends.”

Much evidence suggests that people are very poor at remembering facts such as statistics, while they are better at remembering and repeating ideas cast as narratives or as analogies. “This is hard for our MBA students to accept, because I think business people in general think that facts speak for themselves,” Heath says. To illustrate the power of analogies, he developed a case on the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), an organization that exists to support better health practices. Instead of telling people how many grams of fat are contained in movie popcorn or Chinese restaurant kung pao chicken, CSPI scientists speak of its equivalent in quarter-pounders, the stereotypical bad-for-you fast food. “It works because it’s a vivid analogy, so I can remember it and it’s interesting enough to tell my friends,” Heath says.

Heath also believes ideas are more likely to succeed if they fit into large niches— there are many social situations where people are prompted to remember the ideas. He and Jonah Berger, an honors student at Stanford, used publications databases to track the proliferation of two phrases used by presidential candidates in a televised debate in 2000. Al Gore spoke of putting a “lockbox” on Social Security funds, while George W. Bush criticized opponents of his Social Security proposals for using “fuzzy math.” The researchers found both phrases were repeatedly used in articles about the campaign, but “fuzzy math” crossed over into far more articles that had nothing to do with presidential politics, and its use lasted much longer.

“There probably are more conversational niches in which you could appropriately use ‘fuzzy math’ than ‘lockbox,’” Heath says, “and that helps it propagate.”

— KATHLEEN O'TOOLE

Emotional Selection in Memes: The Case of Urban Legends, Chip Heath, Chris Bell, and Emily Sternberg, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 81), 2001

Do People Prefer to Pass Along Good or Bad News? Valence and Relevance as Predictors of Transmission Propensity, Chip Heath, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (Vol. 68), 1996