Made to Stick

Polls suggest that most Americans: See surveys conducted by the Program
for International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland.
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All of sub-Saharan Africa: As of 2001, sub-Saharan Africa and the entire re-
gion of Asia each received a little more than $1 billion per year. Assuming
that there are 280 million Americans, twelve soft drinks at a bargain price of
$.33 equals $1.1 billion. One movie per year at $8 per movie ticket equals
$2.24 billion.
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How do we keep people’s attention?: Arousing people’s interest and keeping
it are topics that have been discussed frequently among educational psychol-
ogists who want to keep kids engaged in textbooks. Many of their findings are
consistent with the topics we consider in this book: Kids are more engaged
when texts evoke action and images (Concrete) or emotions (Emotional) or
when something is novel (Unexpected, though in our view novelty is more
likely to attract interest than to sustain it). Other topics go beyond what we
discuss here. For example, kids are more engaged when material is personal-
ized (e.g., they pay more attention to math problems that feature their names
or the names of their friends), though this customization strategy is hard to
apply in general. But most of the research in educational psychology has
been limited in that it focuses only on sentence- or paragraph-level charac-
teristics of texts rather than on broader questions, such as how do you get
readers to read whole sections, chapters, or books. Cialdini’s observations on
mystery and Loewenstein’s gap theory of curiosity would add a great deal to
this important area of research. For a review of educational research, see
Suzanne Hidi, “Interest and Its Contribution as a Mental Resource for
Learning,” Review of Educational Research 60 (1990): 549–71.
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