Made to Stick is a book that will help you communicate ideas. And the traits or principles that help us do that include Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Credibility, Concreteness, Emotions, and Stories. In this post, we will begin to look at Emotions.

So how do we make people care about our messages? We don’t have to make people care about our ideas by producing emotion from an absence of emotion. Many ideas can use a piggyback strategy, associating themselves with emotions that already exist. And the most basic way to make people care is to form an association between something they don’t care about and something they do care about. So to make people care about our ideas we have to tap into what they care about.

What matters to people? People matter to people. One reliable way to make people care is to appeal to their self-interest. Self-interest shapes what we pay attention to, even if it doesn’t dictate our stance.

But self-interest isn’t the whole story. Principles - equality, individualism, ideals about government, human rights, and the like - may matter to us even when they violate our immediate self-interest. We may dislike hearing the views of some fringe political group but support its right to speak because we treasure free speech.

Group interest is often a better predictor of political opinions than self-interest. In forming opinions, people seem to ask not “What’s in it for me?” but rater, “What’s in it for my group?”

James March, a professor at Stanford University, proposes that we use two basic models to make decisions. The first involves calculating consequences. We weigh our alternatives, assessing the value of each one, and we choose the alternative that yields us the most value. This model is the standard view of decision-making in economic classes. People are self-interested and rational. Self-interest is important. But it makes for a limited palette.

The second model assumes people make decisions on identity. They ask themselves three questions: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? And what do people like me do in this kind of situation.

Application
Our natural mode is either appeal to the rational mind or to make people feel guilty. Neither of these inspire people to do. We must learn to appeal to something they care about and to do that we have to tap into what they care about. This requires some type of relational connection, whether by the vision-caster or others who can convey those cares to the vision-caster. Once we tap into their concerns and cares, we can make connections into those cares and what we are trying to communicate.