Six Traits of a Memorable Message: The Tap Test and Why it Sticks

Posted by Gretchen Freeman-Cromar on February 14, 2012

Adopted from Made to Stick.

In 2007, Chip & Dan Heath wrote a book titled Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. The book offers six traits that separate what we remember from what we don’t, or more accurately, what’s memorable and what’s not.

The six attributes are:

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• A Story

While they are pretty self-explanatory, each comes to life in one of the more memorable parts of the book where the authors explain a phenomenon called The Curse of Knowledge! (They admittedly capitalize the term to heighten the drama).

The Heath brothers describe The Curse of Knowledge as “Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has ‘cursed’ us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily recreate our listeners state of mind.”

The six traits are the antidote to the curse, and the following excerpt from the book, which uses all six traits, assures that I’ll never forget the concept of The Curse of Knowledge:

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game where she assigned people to one of two roles: ‘tappers’ or ‘listeners’. Tappers received a list of 25 well-known songs, such as “Happy Birthday to You” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener (by knocking on a table). The listener’s job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped. (By the way, this experiment is fun to try at home if there is a good ‘listener’ candidate nearby.)

The listener’s job in this game is quite difficult. Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only 2.5% of the songs—3 songs out of 120. But here’s what made the result worthy of a dissertation in psychology. Before the listeners guessed the name of the song, Newton asked the tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted that the odds were 50%.

The tappers got their message across 1 time in 40, but they thought they were getting their message across 1 time in 2. Why?

When a tapper taps, she is hearing the song in her head. Go ahead and try it for yourself—tap out “The Star Spangled Banner.” It is impossible to avoid hearing the tune playing along in your head. Meanwhile, the listeners can’t hear that tune—all they can hear are a bunch of disconnected taps like a kind of bizarre Morse Code.

In the experiment, tappers are flabbergasted at how hard the listeners seem to be working to pick up the tune. Isn’t the song obvious? The tappers’ expressions, when a listener guesses “Happy Birthday to You” for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” are priceless. How could you be so stupid?

It’s hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it is like to lack that knowledge. When they are tapping, they can’t imagine what it is like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge.

So how does this apply to you? Think of this next time you pick up that phone to talk to a customer, or board that plane to go on-site, or talk to a team mate, ask yourself: ‘Am I a tapper or a listener?’

Knowing which to do and when to do it is a critical part of a successful project, a successful sale cycle or a successful team interaction with a peer.