Chip Heath’s research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places

We reflect back on our 2004 monograph reviewing the implications of faulty self-judgment for health, education, and the workplace. The review proved popular, no doubt because the importance of accurate self-assessment is best reflected in just how broad the literature is that touches on this topic. We discuss opportunities and challenges to be found in the future study of self-judgment accuracy and error, and suggest that designing interventions aimed at improving self-judgments may prove to be a worthwhile but complex and nuanced task.

The plot structure in television advertisements can enhance consumers' brand attitudes and foster increasing consumer and industry recognition. A corpus analysis of contemporary television advertisements shows that advertisements using the repetition-break plot structure are a small percentage of television advertisements but a large percentage of Clio and Effie award-winning advertisements. They are also likely to attain postings and views on YouTube. Three experiments using television advertisements from contemporary brands show that repetitionbreak advertisements are persuasive, leading to more favorable brand attitudes and greater purchase intentions than similar plot structures and that this effect is attributable in part to the advertisements being more engaging. Thus, a theoretically explainable and generic plot structure yields effective advertisements. The result is a new and flexible tool for marketing professionals to use to generate advertisements, with guidelines for when and why it should and should not be effective.

Why do well-known ideas, practices, and people maintain their cultural prominence in the presence of equally good or better alternatives? This article suggests that a social-psychological process whereby people seek to establish common ground with their conversation partners causes familiar elements of culture to increase in prominence, independently of performance or quality. Two studies tested this hypothesis in the context of professional baseball, showing that common ground predicted the cultural prominence of baseball players better than their performance, even though clear performance metrics are available in this domain. Regardless of performance, familiar players, who represented common ground, were discussed more often than lesser-known players, both in a dyadic experiment (Study 1) and in natural discussions on the Internet (Study 2). Moreover, these conversations mediated the positive link between familiarity and a more institutionalized measure of prominence: All-Star votes (Study 2). Implications for research on the psychological foundations of culture are discussed.

Three experiments test whether specific, challenging goals increase risk taking. We propose that goals serve as reference points, creating a region of perceived losses for outcomes below a goal (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979; Tversky & Kahneman, 1992). According to the Prospect Theory value function, decision makers become more risk seeking in the domain of losses. In all three experiments we compared a "do your best" condition with a "specific, challenging goal" condition. The goal condition consistently increased risky behavior in both negotiation and decision making tasks. The discussion considers how goals influence expectations, strategy choice, and unethical behavior.

Armies, churches, organizations, and communities often engage in activities-for example, marching, singing, and dancing-that lead group members to act in synchrony with each other. Anthropologists and sociologists have speculated that rituals involving synchronous activity may produce positive emotions that weaken the psychological boundaries between the self and the group. This article explores whether synchronous activity may serve as a partial solution to the free-rider problem facing groups that need to motivate their members to contribute toward the collective good. Across three experiments, people acting in synchrony with others cooperated more in subsequent group economic exercises, even in situations requiring personal sacrifice. Our results also showed that positive emotions need not be generated for synchrony to foster cooperation. In total, the results suggest that acting in synchrony with others can increase cooperation by strengthening social attachment among group members.

Using research into learning from sequences of examples, we generate predictions about what cultural products become widely distributed in the social marketplace of ideas. We investigate what we term the Repetition-Break plot structure: the use of repetition among obviously similar items to establish a pattern, and then a final contrasting item that breaks with the pattern to generate surprise. Two corpus studies show that this structure arises in about a third of folktales and story jokes. An experiment shows that jokes with this structure are more interesting than those without the initial repetition. Thus, we document evidence for how a cognitive factor influences the cultural products that are selected in the marketplace of ideas.

People often diverge from members of other social groups: They select cultural tastes (e.g., possessions, attitudes, or behaviors) that distinguish them from outsiders and abandon tastes when outsiders adopt them. But while divergence is pervasive, most research on the propagation of culture is based on conformity. Consequently, it is less useful in explaining why people might abandon tastes when others adopt them. The 7 studies described in this article showed that people diverge to avoid signaling undesired identities. A field study, for example, found that undergraduates stopped wearing a particular wristband when members of the "geeky" academically focused dormitory next door started wearing them. Consistent with an identity-signaling perspective, the studies further showed that people often diverge from dissimilar outgroups to avoid the costs of misidentification. Implications for social influence, identity signaling, and the popularity and diffusion of culture are discussed.

Divergence is a fact of social life; people select different tastes to distinguish themselves from others and they abandon tastes when others adopt them. But while we know a great deal about conformity, it predicts convergence, and thus is less equipped to explain why people diverge. We suggest people diverge to maintain clear signals of identity. Our approach emphasizes that the meaning of signals is set at a social rather than individual level. Tastes gain signal value through association with groups or types of individuals, but become diluted when members of more than one type hold them. Thus different types of people will diverge in the tastes they select, and they will abandon tastes they previously liked when they are adopted by members of other social types. (127 words)

We propose that consumers often make choices that diverge from those of others to ensure that they effectively communicate desired identities. Consistent with this identity-signaling perspective, four studies illustrate that consumers are more likely to diverge from majorities, or members of other social groups, in product domains that are seen as symbolic of identity (e.g., music or hairstyles, rather than backpacks or stereos). In identity domains, participants avoided options preferred by majorities and abandoned preferences shared with majorities. The social group associated with a product influenced choice more in identity domains and when a given product was framed as identity relevant. People diverge, in part, to avoid communicating undesired identities. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Impenetrable strategy statements can't unite employees behind an organization's goals, but concrete language and stories can.