Made to Stick (14 page)

The Packard Foundation, a Silicon Valley institution created by one of the founders of the Hewlett-Packard Company, provided a large grant to protect the Mount Hamilton Wilderness. Other environmental groups in the Bay Area started campaigning to preserve the area. Sweeney says, “We’re always laughing now, because we see other people’s documents and they’re talking about the Mount Hamilton Wilderness. We say, ‘You know we made that up.’”

People who live in cities tend to name and define their neighborhoods: “the Castro,” “SoHo,” “Lincoln Park,” and so forth. These names come to define an area and its traits. Neighborhoods have personalities. The Nature Conservancy created the same effect with its landscapes. The Mount Hamilton Wilderness is not a set of acres; it’s an eco-celebrity.

This is not a story about land; it’s a story about abstraction. TNC
avoided the trap of abstraction—saving 2 million acres per year—by converting abstract blobs on a map into tangible landscapes. TNC realized, wisely, that the context had grown more ambiguous, and the solutions had grown more ambiguous, but that their
messages
could not be allowed to grow more ambiguous. Concreteness is an indispensable component of sticky ideas.

What makes something “concrete”? If you can examine something with your senses, it’s concrete. A V8 engine is concrete. “Highperformance” is abstract. Most of the time, concreteness boils down to specific people doing specific things. In the “Unexpected” chapter, we talked about Nordstrom’s world-class customer service. “World-class customer service” is abstract. A Nordie ironing a customer’s shirt is concrete.

Concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert. If you’ve got to teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren’t certain what they know, concreteness is the only safe language.

To see this, we can start by studying math classrooms in Asia. We know, from the news over the years, that East Asian children outperform American children in, well, just about everything (except the consumption of fatty foods). This is especially evident in math. The math skills of Americans fall behind those of Asians early—the gap is apparent in the first grade, and it widens throughout elementary school.

What are Asian schools doing differently? Our stereotype is that these schools operate with almost robotic efficiency: Hours are long and discipline is strict. We think of East Asian students as being less “creative” somehow; we like to think they outperform our students through rote mechanics and memorization. The truth, it turns out, is almost exactly the opposite.

In 1993, a group of researchers studied ten schools in Japan, ten in Taiwan, and twenty in the United States. In each school, they picked two different math teachers to observe, and they observed four lessons with each teacher. The researchers found that
all
the teachers used rote recall quite a bit; it was standard procedure in at least half the lessons observed in every country. But other techniques varied greatly among the three countries.

For instance, consider this question by a Japanese teacher: “You had 100 yen but then you bought a notebook for 70 yen. How much money do you still have?” Or this question, posed by a teacher in Taiwan: “Originally there are three kids playing ball. Two more came later, and then one more joined them. How many are playing now?” As she talked, she drew stick figures on the board and wrote down the equation 3 + 2 + 1.

Notice that these teachers are explaining abstract mathematical concepts by emphasizing things that are concrete and familiar—buying school supplies and playing ball. Their explanations take advantage of preexisting schemas, a tactic we explored in the “Simple” chapter. Teachers take an existing schema—the dynamics of a six-person ball game—and overlay a new layer of abstraction.

The researchers called this style of questioning Computing in Context. It is pretty much the opposite of “rote recall.” And, contrary to our stereotypes, it occurred about twice as much in Asia as it did in the United States (61 percent of lessons versus 31 percent).

In another case, a Japanese teacher placed on a desk 5 rows of 10 tiles each. Then she took away 3 rows of 10 tiles. She asked a student how many tiles were left, and he gave the correct answer: 20. The teacher then asked the students how they knew that this was a subtraction problem. This teacher provided her students with a visual image of subtraction. Students could build an abstract concept—“subtraction”—on a concrete foundation: 30 tiles being yanked away from an original set of 50. The researchers coded questions like this one as Conceptual Knowledge questions. This type of question was
asked in 37 percent of lessons in Japan, 20 percent in Taiwan, but only 2 percent in the United States.

Using concreteness as a foundation for abstraction is not just good for mathematical instruction; it is a basic principle of understanding. Novices crave concreteness. Have you ever read an academic paper or a technical article or even a memo and found yourself so flummoxed by the fancy abstract language that you were crying out for
an example?

Or maybe you’ve experienced the frustration of cooking from a recipe that was too abstract: “Cook until the mixture reaches a hearty consistency.” Huh? Just tell me how many minutes to stir! Show me a picture of what it looks like! After we’ve cooked the dish a few times, then the phrase “hearty consistency” might start to make sense. We build a sensory image of what that phrase represents. But the first time it’s as meaningless as 3 + 2 + 1 would be to a three-year-old.

This is how concreteness helps us understand—it helps us construct higher, more abstract insights on the building blocks of our existing knowledge and perceptions. Abstraction demands some concrete foundation. Trying to teach an abstract principle without concrete foundations is like trying to start a house by building a roof in the air.

Concrete ideas are easier to remember. Take individual words, for instance. Experiments in human memory have shown that people are better at remembering concrete, easily visualized nouns (“bicycle” or “avocado”) than abstract ones (“justice” or “personality”).

Naturally sticky ideas are stuffed full of concrete words and images—think of the Kentucky Fried Rat or the Kidney Heist’s ice-filled bathtub. The Kidney Heist legend would have been far less sticky if the man had woken up and found that someone had absconded with his self-esteem.

Yale researcher Eric Havelock studies tales that have been passed down by word of mouth, such as the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. He notes that these tales are characterized by lots of concrete actions, with few abstractions. Why? The ancient Greeks certainly had no problem with abstraction—this was the society that produced Plato and Aristotle, after all. Havelock believes that the stories evolved away from abstraction over time. When they were passed along from generation to generation, the more memorable concrete details survived and the abstractions evaporated.

Let’s skip to the modern world and another timeless and beautiful domain of expression: accounting. Put yourself in the shoes of an accounting professor who has to introduce accounting principles to college students. To a new student, accounting can seem bewilderingly abstract—the income statement, the balance sheet, T-accounts, accounts receivable, treasury stock. No people or sensory data in sight.

As the teacher, how do you make accounting concepts vivid? Two professors from Georgia State University, Carol Springer and Faye Borthick, decided to try something radically different. In the fall of 2000, Springer and Borthick taught a semester of accounting using, as a centerpiece, a semester-long case study. The case study followed a new business launched by two imaginary college sophomores, Kris and Sandy, at LeGrande State University.

Kris and Sandy had an idea for a new product called Safe Night Out (SNO), a device targeted at parents with teenagers who were old enough to drive. Installed in the teenager’s car, the device would record the route and speed of the car. For the first time, parents could confirm whether their car was being driven responsibly.

At this point you, as a student in introductory accounting, become part of the story. Kris and Sandy are your friends, and they’ve heard that you’re taking an accounting class. They need your help. They ask, Is our business idea feasible? How many units would we have to sell in order to pay for our tuition? You are given guidance on how to track
down the costs of the relevant materials (GPS receivers, storage hardware) and partnerships (how much it would cost to sell it on eBay).

The semester-long Kris and Sandy soap opera revealed the role that accounting plays in business life. Every accounting course defines the distinction between fixed and variable costs, but in the soap opera this distinction wasn’t so much defined as
discovered
. Kris and Sandy have to pay some costs no matter what, such as the programming expense for developing the product. Those are fixed costs. Other costs are incurred only when products are made or sold—the cost of the materials or eBay’s commission, for example. Those are variable costs. If your friends are pouring their tuition money into a start-up business, those distinctions matter.

The case study is an example of learning in context, similar to the teachers in the Asian math classrooms. But in the math classrooms a student might encounter 300 different examples over the course of a semester. In the accounting class, students had one example that was sufficiently rich to encompass a semester’s worth of material.

As the semester progresses, you witness, from your hot seat as Kris and Sandy’s accountant, the evolution of their business. A local court approaches Kris and Sandy wanting to use the SNO device for its parolees, but it wants to lease the device rather than buy it. How should Kris and Sandy respond? Later, the business begins to grow rapidly, but suddenly Kris and Sandy make a panicked call to you, having bounced a check. They’ve been selling more units than ever, yet there’s no cash in the bank. How is that possible? (This problem is faced by many startup businesses, and it introduces the difference between profitability and cash flow.) The answer becomes clear to you only after you’ve worked through a month of payment slips and eBay receipts.

So, did the students learn better? At first it was hard to say. The changes to the course made it hard to compare final exams directly with those of previous years. Some students seemed more enthusiastic about the new course, but others groused because the case study demanded a lot of time. Over time, however, the benefits of the concrete
case study became increasingly obvious. After experiencing the case study, students with high GPAs were more likely to major in accounting. The concreteness actually made the most capable students
want
to become accountants.

But the case study also had positive effects for regular students. In the next accounting course—taken an average of two years later—the first section of the course built heavily on the concepts that students were supposed to have learned in introductory accounting. Students who had worked through the case study scored noticeably higher on this first exam. In fact, the difference in scores was particularly dramatic for students with a C average overall. Generally speaking, they scored twelve points higher. And remember, this is two years after the case study ended. Concreteness sticks.

What is it about concreteness that makes ideas stick? The answer lies with the nature of our memories.

Many of us have a sense that remembering something is a bit like putting it in storage. To remember a story is to file it away in our cerebral filing cabinets. There’s nothing wrong with that analogy. But the surprising thing is that there may be completely different filing cabinets for different kinds of memories.

You can actually test this idea for yourself. The following set of sentences will ask you to remember various ideas. Spend five or ten seconds lingering on each one—don’t rush through them. As you move from one sentence to another, you’ll notice that it
feels different
to remember different kinds of things.

• Remember the capital of Kansas.
  

• Remember the first line of “Hey Jude” (or some other song that you know well).
  

• Remember the
  Mona Lisa
  .
  

• Remember the house where you spent most of your childhood.
  

• Remember the definition of “truth.”
  

• Remember the definition of “watermelon.”
  

David Rubin, a cognitive psychologist at Duke University, uses this exercise to illustrate the nature of memory. Each command to remember seems to trigger a different mental activity. Remembering the capital of Kansas is an abstract exercise, unless you happen to live in Topeka. By contrast, when you think about “Hey Jude,” you may hear Paul McCartney’s voice and piano playing. (If the phrase “Hey Jude” drew a blank, please exchange this book for a Beatles album. You’ll be happier.)

No doubt the
Mona Lisa
memory conjured a visual image of that famously enigmatic smile. Remembering your childhood home might have evoked a host of memories—smells, sounds, sights. You might even have felt yourself running through your home, or remembering where your parents used to sit.

The definition of “truth” may have been a bit harder to summon—you certainly have a sense of what “truth” means, but you probably had no preformulated definition to pluck out of memory, as with the
Mona Lisa
. You might have had to create a definition on the fly that seemed to fit with your sense of what “truth” means.

The definition of “watermelon” might also have involved some mental gyrations. The word “watermelon” immediately evoked sense memories—the striped green rind and red fruit, the sweet smell and taste, the heft of a whole watermelon. Then you might have felt your gears switch as you tried to encapsulate these sense memories into a definition.