Made to Stick by Chip Heath Page A

appears: “Didn’t see that coming?”
    The question fades and is replaced by a statement: “No one ever does.”
    With the sound of a stuck horn blaring in the background, a few final words flash across the screen: “Buckle up … Always.”
    There is no Enclave minivan. This ad was created by the AdCouncil. (The Enclave spot was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation.) The Ad Council, founded in 1942, has launched many successful campaigns, from the World War II—era “Loose Lips Sink Ships” to the more recent “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk.” The Enclave ad, like many other Council ads, capitalizes on the second characteristic of sticky ideas: Unexpectedness.
    The Enclave ad is unexpected because it violates our schema for car commercials. We know how car commercials are supposed to behave. Pickups climb mountains of boulders. Sports cars zip along vacant curvy roads. SUVs carry yuppies through forests to waterfalls. And minivans deliver kids to soccer practice. No one dies, ever.
    The ad is unexpected in a second way: It violates our schema of real-life neighborhood trips. We take thousands of trips in our neighborhoods, and the vast majority of them end safely. The commercial reminds us that accidents are inherently unexpected—we ought to buckle up, just in case.
    Our schemas are like guessing machines. Schemas help us predict what will happen and, consequently, how we should make decisions. The Enclave asks, “Didn’t see that coming?” No, we didn’t. Our guessing machines failed, which caused us to be surprised.
    Emotions are elegantly tuned to help us deal with critical situations. They prepare us for different ways of acting and thinking. We’ve all heard that anger prepares us to fight and fear prepares us to flee. The linkages between emotion and behavior can be more subtle, though. For instance, a secondary effect of being angry, which was recently discovered by researchers, is that we become more certain of our judgments. When we’re angry, we
know
we’re right, as anyone who has been in a relationship can attest.
    So if emotions have biological purposes, then what is the biological purpose of surprise? Surprise jolts us to attention. Surprise is triggered when our schemas fail, and it prepares us to understand why the failure occurred. When our guessing machines fail, surprise grabs our attention so that we can repair them for the future.
The Surprise Brow
    Surprise is associated with a facial expression that is consistent across cultures. In a book called
Unmasking the Face
, Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen coined a term, “the surprise brow,” to describe the distinctive facial expression of surprise: “The eyebrows appear curved and high…. The skin below the brow has been stretched by the lifting of the brow, and is more visible than usual.”
    When our brows go up, it widens our eyes and gives us a broader field of vision—the surprise brow is our body’s way of forcing us to see more. We may also do a double take to make sure that we saw what we thought we saw. By way of contrast, when we’re angry our eyes narrow so that we can focus on a known problem. In addition to making our eyebrows rise, surprise causes our jaws to drop and our mouths to gape. We’re struck momentarily speechless. Our bodies temporarily stop moving and our muscles go slack. It’s as though our bodies want to ensure that we’re not talking or moving when we ought to be taking in new information.
    So surprise acts as a kind of emergency override when we confront something unexpected and our guessing machines fail. Things come to a halt, ongoing activities are interrupted, our attention focuses involuntarily on the event that surprised us. When a minivan commercial ends in a bloodcurdling crash, we stop and wonder,
What is going on?
    Unexpected ideas are more likely to stick because surprise makes us pay attention and think. That extra attention and thinking sears unexpected events