Made to Stick

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 ques-
tions 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 broth-
ers 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 an-
swer 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.”
U N E X P E C T E D
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What will happen next? How will it turn out? We want to answer
these questions, and that desire keeps us interested. It keeps us watch-
ing bad movies—but it might also keep us reading long scientific arti-
cles. McKee and Cialdini have come up with similar solutions to very
different problems.
Yet there are other domains where people can be rabidly inter-
ested in something that lacks this sense of mystery. Kids who obses-
sively 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 un-
folding 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 in-
triguing lecture.
Psychologists have studied this question—What makes people inter-
ested?—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.
T h e “ G a p   T h e o r y ”   o f   C u r i o s i t y
In 1994, George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist at Carnegie
Mellon University, provided the most comprehensive account of sit-
uational 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 pa-
tiently 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
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movies, for instance. McKee’s language is similar to Loewenstein’s:
McKee says, “Story works by posing questions and opening situa-
tions.” 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 charac-
ters am I missing?
One important implication of the gap theory is that we need to