Curiosity Gap
Why do we need to know what happens next?
In this issue
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A headline reads: “This one email mistake costs brands millions.” You don’t even send emails. You click anyway. That itch is the Curiosity Gap.
When we notice a hole between what we know and what we want to know, we want to fill it.
Behavioral economist George Loewenstein explained it in his 1994 information gap theory. Curiosity works like hunger: a mild discomfort we’ll work to make go away.
And we really do work for it. In a 2009 study, Caltech researchers scanned people’s brains while they read trivia questions. The more curious participants felt, the more their brain’s reward circuitry fired up.
Curious participants also spent scarce tokens and waiting time to see the answers. Bonus: they remembered surprising answers better 1 to 2 weeks later.
But the gap needs the right size. Know nothing about a topic, and you shrug. Know everything, and there’s nothing left to find out.
You’ve felt it:
- A friend texts “you won’t believe what happened,” then goes offline.
- A TV episode ends mid-scene, and suddenly it’s 2 AM.
Your audience feels it too. Here’s how to put it to work.
Three ways to leverage the Curiosity Gap
Make the product the puzzle
In September 2019, Oreo put a cookie on shelves and refused to say what flavor it was.
The #MysteryOREO contest asked fans to taste the cinnamon cookie and guess the creme. Correct guesses entered a draw for $50,000.
Every pack became a clue. Celebrities posted their guesses, fans argued online, and Oreo stayed quiet for months.
The answer: churro. Funnel cake, graham cracker and gingerbread topped the list of wrong guesses.
Turn the product into the question. A mystery flavor, a hidden feature or a sealed box makes buying the only way to find out.
Tease the story, don’t spoil it
Upworthy built its traffic on one rule: the headline sells the click, never the ending.
Back in the early 2010s, their editors wrote 25 headlines per post and tested reader response before picking a winner.
Co-founder Peter Koechley even called it the Curiosity Gap. Too vague, and readers don’t care. Too specific, and they don’t need to click.
The team also admitted interns wrote its two biggest headline hits. Gut feeling loses to testing.
Yep, clickbait still works. No matter how repulsed you are by it. And it probably always will.
Our take: Test, test, test. Multiple buttons, different landing pages, 10 different subject lines for every email. Reveal little at first. Let the data pick the winner.
End every episode on a cliffhanger
Writers have used cliffhangers for centuries. In 2012, Netflix built on top of it.
It gave them an autoplay button.
The Post-Play feature shrinks the credits when an episode ends, previews the next one and starts it automatically after 15 seconds.
The timing is the trick. The gap is widest right after a cliffhanger, and Netflix serves the answer before your brain votes for bed.
Some viewers complained. Netflix responded by adding an off switch in settings, not by removing the feature.
Open a loop at the end of every touchpoint. Tease the next email, or end a demo on the question your next video answers.
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CREATORS: One podcast ad read could backfire. In a survey by Amazon-owned studio Wondery, 85% see their favorite creator as a friend. Half assume a host who mentions a brand only once doesn’t like it, while 71% read repeat mentions as genuine. You may need to budget for multi-episode deals.
GOOGLE: Google’s new When to Buy Guide uses last year’s US discount and Search data to show when holiday deals peak. Its picks: fragrance right after Black Friday, handbags mid-December, suitcases and motorized tech toys in late December.
E-COMMERCE: Customers ignoring your longer warranty? They might not know it exists. Chicago Booth says standard analysis mistakes inattention for indifference when features hide on product pages. His model separates the two, flags features customers value but miss, and picks the most promising layouts to A/B test.
ICYMI, last time we looked at the Spacing Effect.
The "Curious" Crew
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