Made to Stick (25 page)

Army food is just about what you’d expect: bland, overcooked, and prepared in massive quantities. The dishes are not garnished with sprigs of parsley. The mess halls are essentially calorie factories, giving the troops the fuel they need to do their jobs. An old Army proverb says, “An Army travels on its stomach.”

The Pegasus chow hall, just outside the Baghdad airport, has developed a different reputation. At Pegasus, the prime rib is perfectly prepared. The fruit platter is a beautiful assortment of watermelon, kiwi fruit, and grapes. There are legends of soldiers driving to Pegasus from the Green Zone (the well-protected Americanized area of Baghdad), along one of the most treacherous roads in Iraq, just to eat a meal.

Floyd Lee, the man in charge of Pegasus, was retired from his twenty-five-year career as a Marine Corps and Army cook when the Iraq war began. He came out of retirement to take the job. “The good Lord gave me a second chance to feed soldiers,” he said. “I’ve waited for this job all my life, and here I am in Baghdad.”

Lee is well aware that being a soldier is relentlessly difficult. The soldiers often work eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. The threat of danger in Iraq is constant. Lee wants Pegasus to provide a respite from the turmoil. He’s clear about his leadership mission: “As I see it, I am not just in charge of food service; I am in charge of morale.”

Think about that:
I am in charge of morale
. In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy, Lee is going for Transcendence.

This vision manifests itself in hundreds of small actions taken by Lee’s staff on a daily basis. At Pegasus, the white walls of the typical mess hall are covered with sports banners. There are gold treatments on the windows, and green tablecloths with tassels. The harsh fluorescent lights have been replaced by ceiling fans with soft bulbs. The servers wear tall white chef’s hats.

The remarkable thing about Pegasus’s reputation for great food is that Pegasus works with exactly the same raw materials that everyone
else does. Pegasus serves the same twenty-one-day Army menu as other dining halls. Its food comes from the same suppliers. It’s the attitude that makes the difference. A chef sorts through the daily fruit shipment, culling the bad grapes, selecting the best parts of the watermelon and kiwi, to prepare the perfect fruit tray. At night, the dessert table features five kinds of pie and three kinds of cake. The Sunday prime rib is marinated for two full days. A cook from New Orleans orders spices that are mailed to Iraq to enhance the entrées. A dessert chef describes her strawberry cake as “sexual and sensual”—two adjectives never before applied to Army food.

Lee realizes that serving food is a job, but improving morale is a mission. Improving morale involves creativity and experimentation and mastery. Serving food involves a ladle.

One of the soldiers who commute to Pegasus for Sunday dinner said, “The time you are in here, you forget you’re in Iraq.” Lee is tapping into Maslow’s forgotten categories—the Aesthetic, Learning, and Transcendence needs. In redefining the mission of his mess hall, he has inspired his co-workers to create an oasis in the desert.

Even John Caples, the mail-order copywriter, admits that there are powerful motivations outside narrow self-interest. He tells a story about a marketer who was promoting a new educational film on fire safety that was intended to help firemen. This marketer had been taught that there are three basic consumer appeals: sex, greed, and fear.

The marketer’s instinct was that greed would work best in this situation. He came up with a couple of ideas for free giveaways that would persuade firemen to check out the film. He began calling local units to figure out which giveaway would have the most appeal. When he called, he would describe the new film and ask, “Would you like to see the film for possible purchase for your educational programs?” The universal answer was an enthusiastic “Yes!”

The second question tested two versions of his greed appeal: “Would your firefighters prefer a large electric popcorn popper or an excellent set of chef’s carving knives as a thank-you for reviewing the film?”

The first two calls yielded definitive answers to this question: “Do you think we’d use a fire safety program because of some #*$@%! popcorn popper?!”

The marketer stopped asking about the free gifts.

S
o, sometimes self-interest helps people care, and sometimes it backfires. What are we to make of this? The mystery deepens if we consider politics. The conventional wisdom is that voters are paragons of self-interest. If there’s a proposal on the table to raise the marginal tax rate on the highest incomes, we expect rich people to vote against it and everyone else to vote for it.

Actually, this conventional wisdom is wrong. There’s not much evidence that public opinion can be predicted by narrow self-interest. In 1998, Donald Kinder, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, wrote an influential survey of thirty years of research on this topic. He summarizes the effects of self-interest on political views as “trifling.” Trifling! Kinder writes:

These findings are bracingly counterintuitive. If people aren’t supporting their own self-interest, whose interests are they supporting?

The answer is nuanced. First, self-interest does seem to matter, quite a bit, when the effects of a public policy are significant, tangible, and immediate. For example, in California in 1978, a ballot initiative called Proposition 13 called for a sharp reduction in property taxes in exchange for equally sharp reductions in public services such as schools, libraries, and police and fire departments. On this issue, homeowners—tired of the huge tax increases that accompany rising property values—voted for Proposition 13. Librarians and firefighters, among others, voted against it. Second, self-interest shapes what we pay attention to, even if it doesn’t dictate our stance. For example, on Proposition 13 homeowners and public employees were more likely to have a well-formed opinion on the initiative—even if their opinion was inconsistent with their personal self-interest.

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.

And perhaps the most important part of the story is this: “Group interest” is often a better predictor of political opinions than self-interest. Kinder says that in forming opinions people seem to ask not “What’s in it for me?” but, rather, “What’s in it for my group?” Our group affiliation may be based on race, class, religion, gender, region,
political party, industry, or countless other dimensions of difference.

A related idea comes from James March, a professor at Stanford University, who proposes that we use two basic models to make decisions. The first model 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 economics classes: People are self-interested and rational. The rational agent asks, Which sofa will provide me with the greatest comfort and the best aesthetics for the price? Which political candidate will best serve my economic and social interests? The second model is quite different. It assumes that people make decisions based 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?

Notice that in the second model people aren’t analyzing the consequences or outcomes for themselves. There are no calculations, only norms and principles. Which sofa would someone like me—a Southeastern accountant—be more likely to buy? Which political candidate should a Hollywood Buddhist get behind? It’s almost as if people consulted an ideal self-image:
What would someone like me do?

This second model of decision-making helps shed light on why the firefighters got angry about the popcorn popper. Bear in mind that the popcorn popper wasn’t a bribe. If the marketer had said, “Order this film for your firehouse and I’ll give you a popcorn popper for your family,” clearly most people would reject the offer on ethical grounds. On the contrary, the offer was innocuous:
We will give you a popcorn popper to thank you for the trouble you’re taking to review the film. You can have the popper regardless of your decision on the film
. There’s nothing unethical about accepting this offer.

And we can go further than that: From a self-interested, value
maximizing point of view, it is simply stupid to turn down this offer. If you make Decision A, you end up with a popcorn popper. If you make Decision B, you end up with no popcorn popper. Everything else is the same. So unless popcorn destroys value in your world, you’d better make Decision A.

But from the perspective of the identity model of decision-making, turning down the popper makes perfect sense. The thought process would be more like this: “I’m a firefighter. You’re offering me a popcorn popper to get me to view a film on safety. But firefighters aren’t the kind of people who need little gifts to motivate us to learn about safety. We risk our lives, going into burning buildings to save people. Shame on you for implying that I need a popcorn popper!”

There are ways to unite these two decision models. What if the marketer had offered to donate fifty dollars to a school’s fire-safety program in exchange for the firemen’s viewing the film? It’s less clear that this offer would have violated the firefighters’ sense of identity.

Self-interest is important. There’s no question that we can make people care by appealing to it. But it makes for a limited palette. Always structuring our ideas around self-interest is like always painting with one color. It’s stifling for us and uninspiring for others.

Floyd Lee, the manager of the Pegasus dining hall, has it right. He could have generated motivation through a strict self-interest appeal: perhaps by offering to let his employees off ten minutes early every night if they worked hard, or by giving them the first choice of the steaks. Instead, he helped create a kind of Pegasus identity:
A Pegasus chef is in charge of morale, not food
. You can imagine hundreds of decisions being made by staffers in the tent who think to themselves,
What should a Pegasus person do in this situation?

CLINIC

The Need for Algebra and Maslow’s Basement

THE SITUATION:
Every algebra teacher in recorded history has had to deal with two student questions: “Why do I need to know this? When will I ever use this?” This Clinic examines three attempts to answer these questions
.

• • •

MESSAGE 1:
In a 1993 conference on “Algebra for All,” the following points were made in response to the question “Why study algebra?”

• Algebra provides methods for moving from the specific to the general. It involves discovering the patterns among items in a set and developing the language needed to think about and communicate it to others.
  

• Algebra provides procedures for manipulating symbols to allow for understanding of the world around us.
  

• Algebra provides a vehicle for understanding our world through mathematical models.
  

• Algebra is the science of variables. It enables us to deal with large bodies of data by identifying variables (quantities which change in value) and by imposing or finding structures within the data.
  

• Algebra is the basic set of ideas and techniques for describing and reasoning about relations between variable quantities.
  

COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 1:
This message illustrates the problems posed by the Curse of Knowledge. Presumably, this conference was filled with a group of algebra experts and they came up with an answer that seemed plausible to other experts. But let’s get real: Will
any restless student jump on the algebra bandwagon after being told that it “provides procedures for manipulating symbols to allow for understanding of the world”? As a
definition
of algebra, the bullets above seem quite logical. But as
reasons
for studying algebra, they don’t work. We need a message that makes students care about algebra.

• • •

MESSAGE 2:
We made up the following response. It was inspired by several examples that we saw floating around the Internet:

Here’s what I tell my students about why they need to learn algebra:

• You need it to get your high school diploma.
  

• Every future math and science class you take will require a knowledge of algebra.
  

• To get admitted to a good college, you’ll need a good record in math.
  

• And even if you don’t ever plan to attend college, the reasoning skills you learn in algebra will help you buy a home, create a budget, etc.
  

My brother is a sales rep for a high-tech firm … he always had trouble with math in school but now realizes the hard work he put into the course has improved his analytical skills and has made him a better presenter to his clients.

COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 2:
This teacher avoids the Curse of Knowledge by speaking practically, but he stays close to Maslow’s Basement. Why study algebra? The first reason: You have to do it because you have to do it. The second: You have to do it so that you can do more of it. The primary appeal is to Esteem—the desire to be competent, to gain approval and status. The most effective part is the part
about the author’s brother, who later realized that his struggles with math paid off. The brother story is an Esteem appeal that builds in an almost Caples-esque victory story. (“They laughed when I botched the equation, but when I won the account …”)

• • •

MESSAGE 3:
This is a response from a high school algebra teacher, Dean Sherman, to an Internet discussion of this topic among high school teachers:

My grade 9 students have difficulty appreciating the usefulness of the Standard Form of the equation of a line, prompting them to ask, “When are we ever going to need this?”

This question used to really bother me, and I would look, as a result, for justification for everything I taught. Now I say, “Never. You will never use this.”

I then go on to remind them that people don’t lift weights so that they will be prepared should, one day, [someone] knock them over on the street and lay a barbell across their chests. You lift weights so that you can knock over a defensive lineman, or carry your groceries or lift your grandchildren without being sore the next day. You do math exercises so that you can improve your ability to think logically, so that you can be a better lawyer, doctor, architect, prison warden or parent.

MATH IS MENTAL WEIGHT TRAINING. It is a means to an end (for most people), not an end in itself.

COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 3:
This is a great response. Note the elements we’ve seen before in the book: The surprise opening to grab attention (“Never. You will never use this”). Also, the use of analogy is brilliant—he taps our existing schema of weight lifting to change our model of “learning algebra” (i.e., it’s not that in the future you’re
going to have a daily need to find the slope of a line; it’s that you’re making your brain more muscular).

He is also moving up Maslow’s hierarchy. The appeal here is to higher levels like Learning and Self-actualization. The idea is that learning algebra makes you realize more of your potential.

SCORECARD
Checklist	Msg. 1	Msg. 2	Msg. 3
Simple	-	-
Unexpected	-	-
Concrete	-
Credible	-	-	-
Emotional	-
Story	-		-

PUNCH LINE:
“Math is mental weight training” reminds us that, even in the most mundane situations, there’s an opportunity to move out of Maslow’s basement and into the higher levels of motivation.