Hit Makers summary

For most people, a bullet train or a soda fountain doesn’t conjure thoughts about the history of design. But behind every object lies a story, and the history behind these sorts of objects in particular has much to tell us about the ways people perceive and consume everyday goods.

The common factor between them is Raymond Loewy, a French orphan with a talent for drawing who single-handedly brought modern design to the United States.

When you stumble upon a new song that you love, do you find yourself listening to it on repeat? You’re not alone.

Human taste in pop music gravitates toward repetition. In fact, 90 percent of the music people listen to is music they have heard before. You need look no further than the Billboard Hot 100, which tracks the popularity of music in America, to know that once a song becomes popular, it stays popular for months.

A few years back, the model, actress and athlete Geena Davis was watching a children’s TV show with her daughter and was appalled by what she saw. Davis realized that popular culture readily enforces sexism, a tendency that’s particularly pronounced in the American entertainment industry.

So, in 2009, Davis, along with the entertainer Madeline Di Nonno, founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which endeavors to explore and expose the ways popular culture promotes sexism.

Authorities and peers can have a big impact on popularity. If an authoritative or famous person calls something popular – boom, it is! Likewise, some Facebook pages look popular, but they’ve been artificially boosted by fake likes.

The good news is, this kind of manipulation only goes so far.

A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar. The bartender looks at them and asks, “what is this, some kind of joke?”

Did this make you laugh? If it did, science can explain why. One of the reasons people find things funny is that they violate expectations, but in a nonoffensive way.

Many a star would sell his soul, along with that of his grandmother, if he knew it would cement his enduring popularity in the public eye. Ultimately, however, popularity isn’t something that can be controlled – at least not entirely. In the end, chance plays a major role in determining the appeal of any given thing or person.

Just take Duncan Watts, a Microsoft computer scientist who studied the reactions of thousands of interconnected people to a new product by way of a simulation in a model universe. In Watts’s simulation, two elements were used to decide whether a product would become popular in a given population: vulnerability, or how open people are to trying something new, and density, how well connected each person is.

The internet is awash with sudden, and often puzzling, instances of popularity. For instance, who would think that audiences would go wild for a potbellied man singing and dancing to a song like “Gangnam Style”?

We all talk about videos like this going viral, but the truth is actually a bit different. In fact, the entire notion of a viral hit is a myth.