Book Recommendation: Made to Stick

Last May a few of our friends gave us some audiobooks to listen to (and help us survive) on our drive to California. Since then, Tim and I have listened to 16 audiobooks together and I've listened to 2 on my own.

Most recently, I started listening to Made to Stick: Why some ideas survive and others die, which I borrowed from our local library. I'm only on chapter 4 so I can't say for sure that the whole book is interesting, but based on what I've heard so far I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who has to communicate ideas to people. It would be a great bennefit to teachers, business people and pastors. The principles are easy to understand and they do an excellent job of illustrating their points with lots of examples.

For instance, people think they have better intuition than they actually do, but how do you effectively demonstrate to them that their intuition is flawed? The book lists an example where people are asked to predict which option kills more people each year: suicide or homicide, floods or tuberculosis, asthma or tornadoes. Many people predict that homicide, floods and tornadoes kill more people each year than suicide (50% more), tuberculosis (9x more) and asthma (80x more) because of something called an availability bias, which causes us to judge the likeliness of an event based on it's availability in our memory. Had the researchers simply said,

"Suicide, tuberculosis and asthma kill more people each year than homicide, floods or tornadoes. However, in a study by the university of ___, many people predicted that the opposite was true. This is due to something called the availability bias."

Many people would hear that and think the people who guessed wrong were dumb and that they would have guessed correctly.

By demonstrating the principle of availability bias, rather than just telling people about it, you make them more likely to understand and apply that information to themselves.