The world does not accord with our intuition. Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions. Without the evidence of the Distracter, which told them that their intution about fantasy and reality was wrong,
Sesame Street would today be a forgotten footnote in television history. Lester Wunderman's gold box sounded like a silly idea until he proved how much more effective it was than conventional advertising. That no one responded to Kitty Genovese's screams sounded like an open-and-shut case of human indifference, until careful psychological testing demonstrated the powerful influence of context.
To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.