by Dan Heath
McKee says, “Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.” In Trading Places, the Turning Point with Billy Ray and the Duke brothers makes the audience curious. How will Valentine, the street-smart con man, fare as a trader?
In McKee’s view, a great script is designed so that every scene is a Turning Point. “Each Turning Point hooks curiosity. The audience wonders, What will happen next? and How will it turn out? The answer to this will not arrive until the Climax of the last act, and so the audience, held by curiosity, stays put.” McKee notes that the How will it turn out? question is powerful enough to keep us watching even when we know better. “Think of all the bad films you’ve sat through just to get the answer to that nagging question.”
What will happen next? How will it turn out? We want to answer these questions, and that desire keeps us interested. It keeps us watching bad movies—but it might also keep us reading long scientific articles. McKee and Cialdini have come up with similar solutions to very different problems.
Yet there are other domains where people can be rabidly interested in something that lacks this sense of mystery. Kids who obsessively memorize Pokémon characters and their traits are motivated by something, but it isn’t What will happen next? It isn’t a sense of an unfolding mystery that keeps car buffs plowing through every issue of Car & Driver. But, as we’ll discover, Pokémon fans and car buffs have something in common with movie viewers and students in an intriguing lecture.
Psychologists have studied this question—What makes people interested?—for decades. The holy grail of research on interest is to find a way to describe situational interest. In other words, what features of a situation spark and elevate interest? What makes situations interesting? As it turns out, Cialdini and McKee were pretty close to the mark.
The “Gap Theory” of Curiosity
In 1994, George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University, provided the most comprehensive account of situational interest. It is surprisingly simple. Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.
Loewenstein argues that gaps cause pain. When we want to know something but don’t, it’s like having an itch that we need to scratch. To take away the pain, we need to fill the knowledge gap. We sit patiently through bad movies, even though they may be painful to watch, because it’s too painful not to know how they end.
This “gap theory” of interest seems to explain why some domains create fanatical interest: They naturally create knowledge gaps. Take movies, for instance. McKee’s language is similar to Loewenstein’s: McKee says, “Story works by posing questions and opening situations.” Movies cause us to ask, What will happen? Mystery novels cause us to ask, Who did it? Sports contests cause us to ask, Who will win? Crossword puzzles cause us to ask, What is a six-letter word for “psychiatrist”? Pokémon cards cause kids to wonder, Which characters am I missing?
One important implication of the gap theory is that we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The trick to convincing people that they need our message, according to Loewenstein, is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they’re missing. We can pose a question or puzzle that confronts people with a gap in their knowledge. We can point out that someone else knows something they don’t. We can present them with situations that have unknown resolutions, such as elections, sports events, or mysteries. We can challenge them to predict an outcome (which creates two knowledge gaps—What will happen? and Was I right?).
As an example, most local news programs run teaser ads for upcoming broadcasts. The teasers preview the lead story of the evening, usually in laughably hyperbolic terms: “There’s a new drug sweeping the teenage community—and it may be in your own medicine cabinet!” “Which famous local restaurant was just cited—for slime in the ice machine?” “There’s an invisible chemical in your home—and it may be killing you right now!”
These are sensationalist examples of the gap theory. They work because they tease you with something that you don’t know—in fact, something that you didn’t care about at all, until you found out that you didn’t know it. “Is my daughter strung out on one of my old prescriptions? I wonder if I ate at the restaurant with the slime?”
A little dollop of the news-teaser approach can make our communications a lot more interesting, as we’ll see in the Clinic.
CLINIC
An Internal Presentation on Fund-raising
THE SITUATION: Imagine that you’re the fund-raising manager for a local theater company. Your job is to help raise donations to support the theater. It’s now the end of the year, and you’re preparing a summary presentation for the theater’s board of directors.
• • •
MESSAGE 1: (Both messages in this Clinic are made up.)
This year we targeted support from theatergoers under thirty-five. Our goal is to increase donations from younger patrons, who have traditionally composed a much greater percentage of our audience than of our donor base. To reach them, we implemented a phone-based fund-raising program. Six months into the program, the response rate has been almost 20 percent, which we consider a success.
COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 1: This message is a classic summary approach. I know the facts. I’ve put the facts in a logical order and I will spoon-feed them to you. As a presentation format, it’s safe and normal and thoroughly nonsticky.
In improving this message, we need to think about how to elicit interest rather than force-feeding facts. We’ll try to add a dash of the news-teaser approach.
MESSAGE 2: This year we set out to answer a question: Why do people under thirty-five, who make up 40 percent of our audience, provide only 10 percent of our donations? Our theory was that they didn’t realize how much we rely on charitable donations to do our work, so we decided to try calling them with a short overview of our business and our upcoming shows. Going into the six-month test, we thought a 10 percent response rate would be a success. Before I tell you what happened, let me remind you of how we set up the program.
COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 2: This approach is inspired by the gap theory. The goal is not to summarize; it’s to make you care about knowing something, and then to tell you what you want to know. Like the Saturn rings mystery, it starts with a puzzle: Why don’t young people donate more? Then we present a theory and a way of testing it. The mystery engages the members of our audience, causing them to wonder what happened and whether our theory was right.
The improvement here is driven by structure, not content. Let’s face it, this is not a particularly interesting mystery. It would never make an episode of Law & Order. But our minds are extremely generous when it comes to mysteries—the format is inherently appealing.
SCORECARD
Checklist Message 1 Message 2
Simple - -
Unexpected -
Concrete - -
Credible
Emotional - -
Story - -
PUNCH LINE: To hold people’s interest, we can use the gap theory of curiosity to our advantage. A little bit of mystery goes a long way.
The news-teaser approach can be used with all sorts of ideas in all sorts of contexts. To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from “What information do I need to convey?” to “What questions do I want my audience to ask?”
Battling Overconfidence
The gap theory relies on our ability to point out things that people don’t know. One complication is that people tend to think they know a lot. Research has shown that we are typically overconfident about how much we know.
In one study, researchers asked people to consider the serious parking problem faced by their university. Participants were given time to generate as many solutions as they could. T
he participants generated, in total, about 300 solutions, which were classified into seven major categories. One category suggested ways to reduce demand for parking (e.g., by raising parking fees), and another suggested ways to use parking space more efficiently (e.g., by creating spaces for “Compact Cars Only”).
The average participant failed to identify more than 70 percent of the best solutions identified by an expert panel. This failure is understandable; we wouldn’t expect any one person to be able to generate a database worth of solutions. However, when the individuals were asked to assess their own performance, they predicted that they had identified 75 percent. They thought they got the majority, but in reality they’d missed them.
If people believe they know everything, it’s hard to make the gap theory work. Fortunately, there are strategies for combating overconfidence. For instance, Nora Ephron’s journalism teacher prevented overconfidence by causing the students’ schemas of journalism to fail. He made them commit to their preconceived ideas and then pulled the rug out from under them.
Making people commit to a prediction can help prevent overconfidence. Eric Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard, came up with a pedagogical innovation known as “concept testing.” Every so often in his classes, Mazur will pose a conceptual question and then ask his students to vote publicly on the answer. The simple act of committing to an answer makes the students more engaged and more curious about the outcome.
Overconfident people are more likely to recognize a knowledge gap when they realize that others disagree with them. Nancy Lowry and David Johnson studied a teaching environment where fifth and sixth graders were assigned to interact on a topic. With one group, the discussion was led in a way that fostered a consensus. With the second group, the discussion was designed to produce disagreements about the right answer.
Students who achieved easy consensus were less interested in the topic, studied less, and were less likely to visit the library to get additional information. The most telling difference, though, was revealed when teachers showed a special film about the discussion topic—during recess! Only 18 percent of the consensus students missed recess to see the film, but 45 percent of the students from the disagreement group stayed for the film. The thirst to fill a knowledge gap—to find out who was right—can be more powerful than the thirst for slides and jungle gyms.
Gaps Start with Knowledge
If curiosity arises from knowledge gaps, we might assume that when we know more, we’ll become less curious because there are fewer gaps in our knowledge. But Loewenstein argues that the opposite is true. He says that as we gain information we are more and more likely to focus on what we don’t know. Someone who knows the state capitals of 17 of 50 states may be proud of her knowledge. But someone who knows 47 may be more likely to think of herself as not knowing 3 capitals.
Some topics naturally highlight gaps in our knowledge. Human-interest stories are fascinating because we know what it’s like to be human—but we don’t know what it’s like to have certain dramatic experiences. How does it feel to win an Olympic medal? How does it feel to win the Lotto? How did it feel to be conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker (each of whom not only married but had ten children … which sparks several additional lines of questioning)?
Gossip is popular because we know a lot about some people but there’s some information that we lack. We don’t gossip about passing acquaintances. Celebrity gossip is particularly tantalizing. We have a sense of who Tiger Woods and Julia Roberts are, but we crave the missing pieces—their quirks, their romantic struggles, their secret vices.
Curiosity comes from gaps in our knowledge. But what if there’s not much knowledge there to begin with? In the 1960s, an upstart television network, American Broadcasting Corporation, signed a contract to televise NCAA football games. College sports is a classic insiders’ topic. With the exception of a fringe of die-hard sports junkies, most fans usually care only about their own schools’ teams. But ABC could show only a few games each week in each region. For ABC’s bet to pay off, it needed to make viewers care about games that didn’t involve their home teams.
How do you go about making viewers in College Station, Texas, care about the Michigan vs. Ohio State matchup? A twenty-nine-year-old named Roone Arledge, whose previous responsibilities primarily involved assigning crews to cover baseball, boxing, and football games, wrote a memo suggesting ways to improve the coverage of college football games.
Arledge saw ample room for improvement. Sportscasters typically set up their cameras, focused on the field, and waited for something to happen in front of them. They ignored everything else—the fans, the color, the pageantry. “It was like looking out on the Grand Canyon through a peephole in a door,” Arledge said.
One Saturday afternoon, after procrastinating all morning, he sat down to type out a proposal to his bosses:
Heretofore, television has done a remarkable job of bringing the game to the viewer—now we are going to take the viewer to the game! …
After our opening commercial billboards, instead of dissolving to the usual pan shots of the field we will have pre-shot film of the campus and the stadium so we can orient the viewer. He must know he is in Columbus, Ohio, where the town is football mad; or that he is part of a small but wildly enthusiastic crowd in Corvallis, Oregon. He must know what the surrounding country and campus look like, how many other people are watching this game with him, how the people dress at football games in this part of the country, and what the game means to the two schools involved.
The memo was three pages long. It discussed camera angles, impact shots, opening graphics. The heart of the memo, though, was a new way of engaging viewers who might not ordinarily care about a college game in Corvallis, Oregon. The trick, Arledge said, was to give people enough context about the game so that they’d start to care.
Other people at ABC were excited by what Arledge had written. Two days later, he was asked—at age twenty-nine, with a skimpy résumé—to produce a college-football game using the guidelines in his memo.
Arledge intuitively made use of Loewenstein’s gap theory. How do you get people interested in a topic? You point out a gap in their knowledge. But what if they lack so much knowledge about, say, the Georgia Bulldogs, that they’ve got more of an abyss than a gap? In that case, you have to fill in enough knowledge to make the abyss into a gap. Arledge set the scene, showed the local fans, panned across the campus. He talked up the emotions, the rivalries, the histories. By the time the game started, some viewers had begun to care who won. Others were riveted.
Arledge’s next assignment was to take over a series that was eventually renamed Wide World of Sports. The show introduced Americans to a variety of sports events they may never have seen before: the Tour de France, the Le Mans auto races, rodeo championships, ski races, and soccer matches. In covering these events, Arledge used the same philosophy he’d pioneered for the NCAA: Set the context and give people enough backstory that they start to care about the gaps in their knowledge. Who’s going to falter during the grueling twenty-four-hour Le Mans? Will the teacher turned barrel racer win the championship? What the heck is a yellow card?
Arledge died in 2002. During his career, he became the head of ABC Sports and later ABC News. He founded the Wide World of Sports, Monday Night Football, 20/20, and Nightline. He won thirty-six Emmys. The tool kit he developed for NCAA football stood the test of time. The way to get people to care is to provide context. Today that seems obvious, because these techniques have become ubiquitous. But this avalanche of context started because a twenty-nine-year-old wrote a memo about how to make college football more interesting.
Many teachers use some version of the Arledge tool kit to prime their students’ interest. Some label the strategy “advanced organizers.” The idea is that to engage students in a new topic you should start by highlighting some things they already know. An earth-science teacher might ask her students to bring in pictures of an earthquake’s devastation, as a way of l
eading up to a discussion of plate tectonics. Alternatively, the teacher can set the context, à la Arledge, so that students start to become interested. A chemistry teacher might lead into the periodic table of elements by discussing Mendeleyev and his long, passionate quest to organize the elements. In this way, the periodic table emerges from within the context of a sort of detective story.
Knowledge gaps create interest. But to prove that the knowledge gaps exist, it may be necessary to highlight some knowledge first. “Here’s what you know. Now here’s what you’re missing.” Alternatively, you can set context so people care what comes next. It’s no accident that mystery novelists and crossword-puzzle writers give us clues. When we feel that we’re close to the solution of a puzzle, curiosity takes over and propels us to the finish.
Treasure maps, as shown in the movies, are vague. They show a few key landmarks and a big X where the treasure is. Usually the adventurer knows just enough to find the first landmark, which becomes the first step in a long journey toward the treasure. If treasure maps were produced on MapQuest.com, with door-to-door directions, it would kill the adventure-movie genre. There is value in sequencing information—not dumping a stack of information on someone at once but dropping a clue, then another clue, then another. This method of communication resembles flirting more than lecturing.
Unexpected ideas, by opening a knowledge gap, tease and flirt. They mark a big red X on something that needs to be discovered but don’t necessarily tell you how to get there. And, as we’ll see, a red X of spectacular size can end up driving the actions of thousands of people for many years.
Walking on the Moon and Radios in Pockets