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Emotional Ideas Stick — In Politics, Too
Thinking back to the beginning of this interminable year of presidential election campaigning, a moment breaks through the mist of political fatigue: when Hillary Clinton seemed to be caught off guard and spoke through misty eyes of the personal toll her campaign had taken. Many pundits credited that atypical display of vulnerability as the turning point in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, which she won.
Emotional ideas stick, and so do unexpected ones, says Business School Professor Chip Heath in his book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. “When ideas like this are propagated, we find that they’re exaggerated along the way and become even more unexpected,” Heath told the New York Times a few days after the primary. “What I heard was that Hillary broke down and cried, but when I watched it on YouTube she wasn’t really crying. It had already been exaggerated.”