Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger Read Free Book Online

as less remarkable brands like Wells Fargo and Tylenol. Other research finds similar effects.More interesting tweets are shared more, and more interesting or surprising articles are more likely to make the New York Times Most E-Mailed list.
    Remarkability explains why people share videos of eight-year-old girls flawlessly reciting rap lyrics and why my aunt forwarded me a story about a coyote who was hit by a car, got stuck in the bumper for six hundred miles, and survived. It even explains why doctors talk about some patients more than others. Every time there is a patient in the ER with an unusual story (such as someone swallowing a weird foreign object), everyone in the hospital hears about it. A code pink (baby abduction) makes big news even if it’s a false alarm, while a code blue (cardiac arrest) goes largely unmentioned.
    Remarkability also shapes how stories evolve over time. A group ofpsychologists from the University of Illinois recruited pairs of students for what seemed like a study of group planning and performance. Students were told they would get to cook a small meal together and were escorted to a real working kitchen. In front of them were all the ingredients necessary to cook a meal. Piles of leafy green vegetables, fresh chicken, and succulent pink shrimp, all ready to be chopped and thrown into a pan.
    But then things got interesting. Hidden among the vegetablesand chicken, the researchers had planted a small—but decidedly creepy—family of cockroaches. Eww! The students shrieked and recoiled from the food.
    After the bedlam subsided, the experimenter said that someone must be playing a joke on them and quickly canceled the study. But rather than send people home early, he suggested that they go participate in another study that was (conveniently) taking place just next door.
    They all walked over, but along the way they were quizzed about what had happened during the aborted experiment. Half were asked by the experimenter, while the other half were asked by what seemed like another student (who was actually covertly helping the experimenter).
    Depending on whom participants happened to tell the story to, it came out differently. If they were talking to another student—that is, if they were trying to impress and entertain rather than simply report the facts—the cockroaches were larger, more numerous, and the entire experience more disgusting. The students exaggerated the details to make the story more remarkable.
    We’ve all had similar experiences. How big was the trout we caught last time we went fishing in Colorado? How many times did the baby wake up crying during the night?
    Often we’re not even trying to exaggerate; we just can’t recall all the details of the story. Our memories aren’t perfect records of what happened. They’re more like dinosaur skeletons patched together by archeologists. We have the main chunks, but some of the pieces are missing, so we fill them in as best we can. We make an educated guess.
    But in the process, stories often become more extreme or entertaining, particularly when people tell them in front of a group.We don’t just guess randomly, we fill in numbers or information to make us look good rather than inept. The fish doubles in size. The baby didn’t wake just twice during the night—that wouldn’t be remarkable enough—she woke seven times and required skillful parenting each time to soothe her back to sleep.
    It’s just like a game of telephone. As the story gets transmitted from person to person, some details fall out and others are exaggerated. And it becomes more and more remarkable along the way.
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    The key to finding inner remarkability is to think about what makes something interesting, surprising, or novel. Can the product do something no one would have thought possible (such as blend golf balls like Blendtec)? Are the consequences of the idea or issue more extreme than people ever could have imagined?
    One way to generate