Made to Stick (11 page)

KEEPING PEOPLE’S ATTENTION

We began this chapter with two questions: How do we get people’s attention? And how do we keep it? So far, most of our unexpected ideas represent relatively simple, quick adjustments to a model. They may be profound—as with Nora Ephron’s journalism teacher—but they happen rapidly, so they only need to get people’s attention for a short time. Sometimes, though, our messages are more complex. How do we get people to stick with us through a more complex message? How do we
keep
people’s attention?

A few years ago, Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, set out to improve the way he talked about science in his writing and in his classes. For inspiration, he went to the library. He pulled down every book he could find in which scientists were writing for an audience of nonscientists. He photocopied sections of prose that he liked. Later, flipping through his stack of copied passages, he hunted for consistencies.

In passages that weren’t interesting, he found mostly what he expected. The purpose wasn’t clear, and the prose was too formal and riddled with jargon. He also found a lot of predictable virtues in the good passages: The structure was clear, the examples vivid, and the language fluid. “But,” says Cialdini, “I also found something I had not expected—the most successful of these pieces all began with a mystery story. The authors described a state of affairs that seemed to make no sense and then invited the reader into the material as a way of solving the mystery.”

One example that stuck in his mind was written by an astronomer, who began with a puzzle:

The answer unfolded like the plot of a mystery. The teams of scientists pursued promising leads, they hit dead ends, they chased clues. Eventually, after many months of effort, there was a breakthrough. Cialdini says, “Do you know what the answer was at the end of twenty pages? Dust. Dust. Actually, ice-covered dust, which accounts for some of the confusion. Now, I don’t care about dust, and the makeup of the rings of Saturn is entirely irrelevant to my life. But that writer had me turning pages like a speed-reader.”

Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. “You’ve heard of the famous
Aha!
experience, right?” he says. “Well, the
Aha!
experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the
Huh?
experience.”

By creating a mystery, the writer-astronomer made dust interesting. He sustained attention, not just for the span of a punch line but for the span of a twenty-page article dense with information on scientific theories and experimentation.

Cialdini began to create mysteries in his own classroom, and the power of the approach quickly became clear. He would introduce the mystery at the start of class, return to it during the lecture, and reveal the answer at the end. In one lecture, though, the end-of-class bell rang before he had time to reveal the solution. He says, “Normally five to ten minutes before the scheduled end time, some students start preparing to leave. You know the signals—pencils are put away, notebooks folded, backpacks zipped up.” This time, though, the class
was silent. “After the bell rang, no one moved. In fact, when I tried to end the lecture without revealing the mystery, I was pelted with protests.” He said he felt as if he’d discovered dynamite.

Cialdini believes that a major benefit of teaching using mysteries is that “the process of resolving mysteries is remarkably similar to the process of science.” So, by using mysteries, teachers don’t just heighten students’ interest in the day’s material; they train them to think like scientists.

Science doesn’t have a monopoly on mysteries. Mysteries exist wherever there are questions without obvious answers. Why is it so hard to get pandas at the zoo to breed? Why don’t customers like our new product? What’s the best way to teach kids about fractions?

Notice what is happening here: We have now moved to a higher level of unexpectedness. In the Nordstrom example, the Nordie stories had a punchy immediacy:
Nordies warm up customers’ cars!
When you hear this, your past schema of customer service is called up, contradicted, and refined, all in a short period of time. Mysteries act differently. Mystery is created not from an unexpected moment but from an unexpected
journey
. We know where we’re headed—we want to solve the mystery—but we’re not sure how we’ll get there.

A schema violation is a onetime transaction. Boom, something has changed. If we were told that the rings of Saturn were made of dryer lint, a schema would be violated. We could call it “first-level” unexpectedness. But the actual “rings of Saturn mystery” is more extended and subtle. We are told that scientists do not know what Saturn’s rings are made of, and we’re asked to follow on a journey whose ending is unpredictable. That’s second-level unexpectedness. In this way, we jump from fleeting surprise to enduring interest.

Early in the movie
Trading Places
, Billy Ray Valentine (played by Eddie Murphy), an apparently legless beggar, is using his arms to
push himself around on a skateboardish contraption in a public park. He begs for money from passersby and harasses an attractive woman for a date. A couple of cops approach. As they jerk him up, his legs—perfectly normal legs—are exposed. Valentine is a con artist.

Later in the movie, the Duke brothers—two elderly businessmen—intervene to get Valentine out of jail, persuading the cops to release him into their custody. A couple of scenes later, Valentine appears, dressed in a three-piece suit, in a wood-paneled office. The Duke brothers have turned him into a commodities trader.

Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru, uses this example to illustrate the concept of a “Turning Point.” McKee knows something about how to hold an audience’s attention. His screenwriting seminars play to packed auditoriums of aspiring screenwriters, who pay five hundred dollars a head to listen to his thoughts.
The Village Voice
described his course as “damned near indispensable not only for writers, but also for actors, directors, reviewers, and garden-variety cinephiles.” His students have written, directed, or produced television shows such as
E.R., Hill Street Blues
, and
The X-Files
, and movies ranging from
The Color Purple
to
Forrest Gump
and
Friday the 13th
.

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.

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.