# Credibility Sources Catalog Long-form worked examples for each of the six credibility sources from Chapter 4 CREDIBLE of *Made to Stick*. Use this when the SKILL.md summary is not enough and you need to see the full pattern of what good evidence in each category looks like. --- ## 1. External Authority **Definition:** A recognized expert, institution, celebrity, or credentialed body vouches for the claim. The audience transfers their pre-existing trust in the source to the claim itself. **When it works:** - Audience is credentialed peers (scientists, doctors, lawyers) who enforce citation norms. - The expert is unexpected — e.g., a former opponent of the claim now endorsing it. - The expert is paired with at least one other category so the evidence does not become a credentials wall. **When it fails:** - Expert is over-quoted in the category (analyst quotes in B2B tech are now background noise). - The claim and the expert's domain don't exactly match ("Nobel laureate says X" — in what field?). - It is the ONLY evidence type used (credentials-wall failure mode). **Patterns from the book:** Authorities used well are rare in the book — the authors mostly warn against over-reliance on them. The strongest use is when the authority has reversed position on the claim, which functionally converts them into a Sinatra-pattern antiauthority. **Checklist:** - [ ] Expert is credentialed IN the exact domain of the claim. - [ ] The audience would independently recognize the source. - [ ] The expert is not the only category represented in the inventory. --- ## 2. Antiauthority (Credible Victim / Lived Experience) **Definition:** An ordinary person who lived the consequences of the claim. Not an expert — their biography is the proof. The credibility comes from personal stakes, not credentials. **Canonical example — Pam Laffin:** An anti-smoking ad campaign used Pam Laffin — 29 years old, mother of two, started smoking at 10, diagnosed with emphysema at 24, underwent a failed lung transplant. No statistic about smoking mortality lands the way a 29-year-old mother walking through her own dying does. Surgeon General reports had existed for decades; Laffin's biography reached the audience that had ignored every expert. **Why it works:** The resistance to expert messaging is highest in audiences who have already decided the experts are lying to them (teens on smoking, developers on technical debt, users on security, citizens on policy). An antiauthority bypasses that resistance because the messenger has no institutional stake — they are paying the cost in public. **When it works:** - Behavior-change messaging to a resistant audience. - Topics where lived experience is legibly superior to abstract study. - When you can pair the antiauthority with a specific, vivid, concrete biography (Pam Laffin is not a generic "smoker" — she is 29, two kids, started at 10, emphysema at 24). **When it fails:** - The lived experience is vague or anonymized to the point of losing biographical texture. - The antiauthority is not actually antiauthority — e.g., a former executive at the competitor (too close to expert). - Consent and ethics not handled: using someone's story without genuine consent is a credibility bomb on discovery. **Checklist:** - [ ] Messenger is not a credentialed expert in the domain. - [ ] Messenger has personally paid the cost the claim is about. - [ ] Biography is specific and verifiable (name, age, dates, details). - [ ] Consent is real and documented. --- ## 3. Testable Credentials ("Try It Yourself") **Definition:** The audience can verify the claim themselves, in real time, with their own senses. The evidence collapses skepticism into a single observable act. **Canonical examples:** - **Wendy's "Where's the beef?" (1984)** — Wendy's ran an ad campaign contrasting their burgers with competitors' oversized buns hiding undersized patties. The claim ("our patties are bigger") was instantly verifiable: walk into any location, unwrap a burger, compare. The campaign became a cultural phenomenon because the challenge was testable. - **Snickers "satisfies" / the snack-bar category generally** — the credential is that the audience experiences satisfaction immediately after eating, so the claim self-validates in real time. - **Barry Marshall drinking H. pylori (1984)** — Australian researchers Marshall and Warren proposed that stomach ulcers were caused by *Helicobacter pylori* bacteria, not by stress and stomach acid as the medical establishment had insisted for decades. Their peer-reviewed papers were ignored. Marshall then drank a beaker of *H. pylori* cultures, developed gastritis within days, documented it with endoscopy, and cured himself with antibiotics. The self-experiment converted an abstract claim into a public, falsifiable demonstration. Marshall and Warren won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2005. **Why it works:** Testable credentials are the strongest credibility category because they force the audience to run their own experiment. No middleman, no trust transfer, no credentials gap. The audience's own senses become the proof. **When it works:** - Claims about products or experiences the audience can sample cheaply (taste, feel, see). - Claims about reproducible phenomena (benchmarks, open data, free trials). - Claims where the demonstration is cheaper than the argument. **When it fails:** - The verification cost is too high (enterprise software with a 3-month implementation). - The demonstration is rigged (audience discovers and punishes). - The testable credential is available but the copy fails to explicitly invite the test. **Checklist:** - [ ] Audience can verify the claim with their own senses within a short time window. - [ ] The invitation to test is explicit in the copy (not buried in a footer). - [ ] The test is honest — no rigging or selective framing. --- ## 4. Vivid, Convincing Details **Definition:** Specific sensory or biographical detail that a fabricator could not have bothered to invent. The detail is not load-bearing for the argument; its credibility value is precisely that it is too trivial to be a lie. **Canonical example — the Goofy toothbrush juror study:** In a jury simulation study on the effect of vivid details, jurors were more likely to believe a mother testifying about her child's dental hygiene when she mentioned that he had a Goofy-the-Disney-character toothbrush he loved to brush with. The toothbrush had nothing to do with the case — but the jurors reasoned, unconsciously, that no one inventing a story would bother with the brand of the toothbrush. The detail signaled firsthand observation. **Other patterns from the book:** The dancing 73-year-old in a fitness claim outperformed a generic "exercise works at any age" pitch because the specific age and specific activity signaled a real person, not a marketing composite. **Why it works:** Humans have a trained ear for the texture of truth. We do not consciously evaluate details, but we unconsciously flag copy that has the smooth, context-free feel of invention. Load-bearing trivia (the Goofy toothbrush) breaks the smoothness and signals that the speaker has been close to the thing. **When it works:** - Stories and testimonials where you have firsthand access to small sensory details. - Case studies where the client's actual workflow has specific quirks. - Journalism and long-form nonfiction where the reader is scanning for texture. **When it fails:** - The detail is purple prose — decorative rather than load-bearing. - The detail is suspiciously perfect (signals invention rather than observation). - The detail is too on-the-nose to the claim (rigging). **Checklist:** - [ ] The detail is specific enough that no one would bother fabricating it. - [ ] The detail is NOT directly relevant to the claim (its credibility value comes from its irrelevance). - [ ] The detail is first-person observed, not a stereotype. --- ## 5. Sinatra Test (One Overwhelming Hero Example) **Definition:** A single reference so dominant — typically the hardest possible case in the domain — that one mention establishes credibility for the entire category. Named after "If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere" from the Sinatra song about New York. **Canonical examples:** - **Fort Knox (the book's defining example):** A security contractor who has the contract for Fort Knox is in the running for any security contract. You do not need a capabilities deck after that sentence. - **Safexpress and the Harry Potter delivery:** Safexpress, an Indian logistics firm, won enterprise contracts by telling one story: on the launch day of the final Harry Potter book, they delivered sealed copies to 6,000 Indian bookstores across the country in one day, zero leaks, zero early releases. One sentence carried the entire due-diligence conversation. The audience did not need to hear about other customers — the Harry Potter launch was legibly the hardest possible case (distribution, secrecy, deadline), and Safexpress passed it. **Why it works:** A wall of credentials dilutes. A single hero case concentrates. The audience reasons: "If they did THAT, the rest follows." The Sinatra Test is the book's most important credibility insight because it inverts the instinct to pile up proof. **The three pass/fail questions** (also in the SKILL.md): 1. Is this the hardest case in the domain? 2. Is the hard part legible without explanation? 3. Is it verifiable? **When it works:** - Sales pitches with one customer who is legibly the hardest case. - Reference stories where the hard part is self-evident to the audience. - Domains where customers talk and a verifiable reference survives discovery. **When it fails:** - The hero case needs a paragraph of setup to explain why it was hard (Sinatra inflation — see anti-pattern in SKILL.md). - The hero case is cherry-picked and the audience can sense it. - The reference is unverifiable (unnamed customer, lost records). **Checklist:** - [ ] Passes all three Sinatra Test questions (hardest / legible / verifiable). - [ ] Requires no setup paragraph — the audience recognizes the hardness instantly. - [ ] Replacing the entire credentials section with just this one example would still work. --- ## 6. Statistics-as-Illustration (Human Scale) **Definition:** A number translated into a concrete, sensory comparison so the audience can physically feel the magnitude. Raw statistics wash past; illustrated statistics stick. **Canonical example — the nuclear-warheads-as-BBs illustration:** Explaining the US/Soviet nuclear arsenals during the Cold War using raw numbers ("5,000 warheads") produced incomprehension — the audience could not feel the scale. The illustrated version: imagine a single BB represents the Hiroshima bomb. Now picture a garbage can full of BBs. That is the world's nuclear stockpile. And one BB — the Hiroshima bomb alone — flattened a city. The garbage can is terrifying in a way the number "5,000" is not. **Other patterns from the book:** A Stephen Covey example rescales company headcount into a "soccer team" analogy so the audience can grasp the human footprint. Any time the book converts a number to a body-sized reference (a football field, a school bus, a blink), it is applying the Human Scale principle. **Why it works:** Human brains cannot natively process magnitudes above roughly the size of a small tribe. Numbers in the millions and billions are technically precise but emotionally equivalent. Translating the number into a sensory anchor (can, blink, football field) hands the audience a body they can use to feel the scale. **When it works:** - Large-scale claims (infrastructure, epidemiology, finance, climate). - Rate statistics ("per second," "per day") that benefit from a body-sized comparison. - Risk statistics that are emotionally flat as raw numbers. **When it fails:** - The analogy is dishonest (the comparison flatters the number, and the audience catches it). - The analogy is to an abstraction the audience cannot feel ("the size of Belgium" to an American). - The illustration replaces the number entirely and loses technical credibility with credentialed audiences. **Checklist:** - [ ] The analogy uses a body-sized or daily-life-sized reference (blink, can, school bus, elementary class). - [ ] The analogy is honest — not flattering the number. - [ ] The precise number is still present alongside the illustration for audiences that need it. --- ## Default Preference Order (Summary) From strongest to weakest credibility, absent overrides: 1. Testable Credentials 2. Sinatra Test Hero Example 3. Vivid Convincing Details 4. Antiauthority (Credible Victim) 5. Statistics-as-Illustration 6. External Authority **Override rules:** - Credentialed-peer audience (scientists, doctors): External Authority moves to #1-2. - Resistant behavior-change audience (teens on smoking, developers on technical debt): Antiauthority moves to #1. - Scale / magnitude / risk claim: Statistics-as-Illustration moves up. Apply these in Step 3 of the SKILL.md process.