Author: Susan Weinschenk

When people make a public commitment to a product, service, idea, or brand, their self-story about that product, service, idea, or brand becomes stronger. For example, let’s say that Maryanne creates custom bow ties for weddings and sells her bow ties on an arts marketplace online. She has a self-story that she is an arts…

If people filter out information that doesn’t match their self-stories, how can you ever get people to change? Can you ever get people to take an action that doesn’t fit their self-stories? The answer is yes, but you have to start small. A Crack In The Self-Story I used to be a person who didn’t…

People have an idea of who they are and what’s important to them. They have self-stories that they tell themselves and other people about who they are, why they do what they do, and why they believe what they believe. People like to be consistent with their self-stories. So if I feel that I’m someone…

If you want people to be engaged and pay attention to your design and your message, use a story. And for maximum attention, introduce tension into the story. In the dramatic arc discussed earlier in this chapter, the second part of the arc (after the exposition) is rising action. The rising action contains tension. When…

“Ben’s dying.” This is the opening line to a video that Paul Zak (author of The Moral Molecule) used to research the relationship between stories and brain chemicals. NoteYou can watch a short video about Zak’s research on storytelling and the dramatic arc here: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1a7tiA1Qzo). Zak ran experiments with the video. The video is a…

Let’s say you’re reading a newspaper article I wrote about the impact of the global economy. If you were hooked up to an fMRI machine, it would show that your visual cortex is active, since you’re reading, as is Wernicke’s area of the brain, where words are processed. What if you were listening to me…

FOMO stands for Fear of Missing Out. It refers to the idea that some of our behavior is motivated by being afraid that if we don’t take certain actions we are going to miss out on opportunities. A series of research studies by Andrew Przybylski (2013) shows how pervasive FOMO is, and also has some…

Previously we described the status quo bias – the idea that people will tend to stick with what is rather than make a change. The Qwerty keyboard is an example of the status quo bias. The Qwerty keyboard is the keyboard that 99% of us use to type on with our computers. It’s called a…

People prefer to stick with the current situation rather than change. William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser (1988) summarized many studies on the idea of status quo bias. Their conclusion is that when choosing from alternatives, people have a bias towards sticking with the status quo. Based on the research Guthrie Weinschenk (2019) concludes that if…