In a three second world (see Brendan Kane), the skill of grabbing and holding attention is the skill of the digitally wealthy.
So, is it possible to reliably induce curiosity? In particular, could our web visitors, ad viewers, and email readers be more easily persuaded to view our content (and convert into our funnels)?
Luckily, people far smarter than myself have done mind-numbing research to answer this.
And yes. There are, in fact, Four Curiosity Triggers, backed by research in the field of social psychology.
In his book, The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr tackles this interesting concept of curiosity. He cites research by Professor George Loewenstien of Carnegie Mellon University, whose contribution to research on curiosity focuses on the "information gap" theory.
"Brains tend to become curious when presented with an incomplete information set."
That means that when someone realizes that they don't have all the information they need, it spikes our curiosity. It's that moment of "well, wait a second..." followed by a search for some missing information.
There are four core curiosity driving methods:
The posing of a question or puzzle.
Presentation of a sequence of events with an anticipated, but unknown resolution.
Violation of expectations that triggers search for explanation.
Knowledge of possession of information by someone else.
According to Harvard Business Review, however, the "information gap" theory is only one color on the spectrum of curiosity. It seems that we're quite sure that being curious is a highly important and natural phenomenon, but we're just not quite sure how it all works yet.
Thanks for Reading.
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