Made to Stick

Checklist
Message 1
Message 2
Simple
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Unexpected
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Concrete
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Credible




Emotional
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Story
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P U N C H   L I N E :  
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.
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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 con-
vey?” to “What questions do I want my audience to ask?”
B a t t l i n g   O v e r c o n f i d e n c e
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. The participants
generated, in total, about 300 solutions, which were classified into
seven major categories. One category suggested ways to reduce de-
mand for parking (e.g., by raising parking fees), and another sug-
gested 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 under-
standable; 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 real-
ity 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 overcon-
fidence. 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 overcon-
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fidence. 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 commit-
ting 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 sec-
ond 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 re-
vealed 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.
G a p s   S t a r t   w i t h   K n o w l e d g e
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 capi-
tals 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.
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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 ex-
periences. 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 chil-
dren . . . 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 cover-
age 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.
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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 Cor-
vallis, 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 in-
volved.
The memo was three pages long. It discussed camera angles, im-
pact 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
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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 even-
tually renamed Wide World of Sports. The show introduced Ameri-
cans 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