People seem to love origin stories – both in theatre and in life.
“How did it all start?”
“How did you get into this career?”
Or…
“How did you meet your wife/husband?”
And well, I can’t say I’m one to push back on that.
There’s something truly magical about “Once upon a time…”. And I’m no stranger to fairy tales. Growing up, I was largely influenced by older female cousins and family friends. As soon as our parents left to their wine-sipping adult gossip around a table of blackjack, my cousins and older female friends would drag us to watch their favorite Disney movies on the VCR, namely princess movies. I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve seen Beauty and the Beast more than 100 times or Cinderella more than 50 times. In fact, my friends in elementary school would talk about their favorite movies – Transformers, LEGO Bionicles, Peter Pan, and Tarzan. Yet, mine was Disney’s 1998 Mulan.
And they all started with “Once upon a time…”
So, it was no surprise when friends, colleagues, and then strangers started asking me:
“How/when/why did you start hosting social experiments?”
The study that started it all
Once upon a time, in the year 1922……………… okay, you caught me. I wasn’t alive then. It was the year 2018. A late autumn Tuesday sunset, as the neighbors were putting on their final spooky touches before the big day. Looking across the street at one of our neighbors’ homes – the star every year, every holiday season, their front lawn was shrouded under a canopy of noir. The entrance of which, I saw puffs of smoke bellowing out. Guess they were testing out that fog machine. Admittedly, I was surprised it was still working 15 years after I first saw it.
With the gentle amber hue in the background and a “Mwahaha!” in the foreground, I came across a curious line on page 271 in Scott Belsky‘s, the current Chief Product Officer at Adobe, book The Messy Middle:
“Mystery is the magic of engagement.”
In the words that ensued, he wrote about Carnegie Mellon’s George Loewenstein‘s “information-gap” theory – one he published in 1994. The notion that curiosity is created by the feeling of information deprivation. An urge to fill the painful gap in knowledge and relieve ourselves of that pain. Furthermore, there are 5 triggers that sponsor the urge to fill in information gaps:
- Questions or riddles,
- Unknown resolutions,
- Violated expectations,
- Access to information known by others,
- And reminders of something forgotten.
Let’s take it a step deeper
Just like a restaurant’s menu or the photo on Yelp teases your taste buds for resolution, curiosity is satisfied when what we know meets what we want to know. Fascinatingly enough, Loewenstein explains:
“Curiosity poses an anomaly for rational-choice analyses of behavior that assume that the value of information stems solely from its ability to promote goals more basic than the satisfaction of curiosity.”
Like patients. We would rather learn more about our conditions than be given agency over the decisions determining the future outcome of our conditions (Strull, Lo, and Charles, 1984). If you’re like me, I’d rather leave it to the experts in the white coats.
But when does curiosity spike?
Loewenstein cites Hebb, Piaget, and Hunt’s 1950s research, all independent of each other, yet all arriving at the same conclusion.
“There is an inverted U-shaped relationship between evoked curiosity and the extremity of such expectation violations.”
And hey, Caltech’s Colin Camerer‘s research published in 2008’s Psychological Science proves that Loewenstein’s conclusions aged rather well, unlike my recent balsamic vinegar purchase on Amazon. Camerer, who did an experiment on neurological activity when a person reads a trivia question, guesses then sees the answer for that question, also found an upside-down U-shape.
Well, what does that mean? People feel most rewarded when they fill that information gap right after their peak curiosity. And brilliant advertisers and salespeople capture this flawlessly.
What’s more? The more you know about a topic, the more curious you become. Loewenstein calls it the “reference-point phenomenon”:
“Curiosity, in this view, arises when one’s informational reference point in a particular domain becomes elevated above one’s current level of knowledge.”
So, I knew that my social experiments should never feel like an insurmountable task or game with a steep learning curve above the guests current level of comfort.
Everything in moderation.
Donald O. Hebb writes in 1955:
“It appears that, up to a certain point, threat and puzzle have a positive motivating value, beyond that point negative value.”
Furthermore,
“But the animal data show that it is not always a matter of extrinsic reward; risk and puzzle can be attractive in themselves, especially for higher animals such as man. If we can accept this, it will no longer be necessary to work out tortuous and improbable ways to explain why human beings work for money, why school children should learn without pain, why a human being in isolation should dislike doing nothing.”
That last part really speaks to me now, as I assume many others in self-quarantine from COVID or wildfires. And speaking of fires and too much of a threat and puzzle, Hebb cites James Stewart Tyhurst’s 1951 research on reactions to natural disasters,
“The adult who is told that his apartment house is on fire, or who is threatened by a flash flood, may or may not respond intelligently. In various situations, 12 to 25 per cent did so; an equal number show ‘states of confusion, paralyzing anxiety, inability to move out of bed, ‘hysterical’ crying or screaming, and so on.’ Three-quarters or more show a clear impairment of intelligent behavior, often with aimless and irrelevant movements, rather than (as one might expect) panic reactions.”
If you’re craving for more, I highly recommend checking out Loewenstein’s 1994 research here.
For product builders
Unsurprisingly, that same narrative can be brought to the world of entrepreneurship. You know what, not just startups, but just building products and businesses, period. While there are many parallels we can pull from the information-gap theory – content for another blog post, maybe a few, for the purpose of this one, let’s focus on engagement and retention.
If you’re a frequenter of my blog, you’re no stranger to MLPs – minimum lovable products, which was first brought to my attention when I read this First Round piece on Jiaona Zhang, current VP of Product at Webflow. If you’re building a product, you want it to be sticky. You want people to not just use it, but love it. You want them to stay on. And there’s 2 ways to do that:
- Make it harder for them to leave (or uninstall, unsubscribe, or log off).
- Or, make it easier for them to get back on.
Is it worth making it harder to leave?
The first one is easier to do than the second. The first one, often times, gives you a false sense of product-market fit – until you get the torrent of complaints in your customer success inbox or low reviews in the app store. Worse, they complain to their friends, which you can’t track. But in effect, produces negative network effects.
I know I’m not alone when I say there are some newsletters or monthly subscription products that are incredibly hard to unsubscribe from. And even when we do unsubscribe, somehow they still find a way back to us. Whether it’s requiring you to make a call to customer service or click through various links to finally confirm your un-subscription, it sucks. Sometimes, even when you get on a call to unsubscribe and make it through the queue, the rep, following his/her script, is still trying to sell you the product, but at a “discount”. I know some of my colleagues have a saying: If you have to offer a discount, you’re not building the right product. While I’m not in full accordance with it, there may be some truth there.
Or why come back?
The second requires giving people a reason to come back on, on top of making it frictionless. To love means to be curious about their love. That reason can be curiosity about:
- Your product and how deep and far can they go. Is the sky really the limit?
- Or, the people and the world around them, using the same platform they are using.
The most popular social platforms, like TikTok, Facebook, or Twitter, for example, employ a combination of the 5 triggers, but especially – access to information known by others, and reminders of something forgotten. While the most viral content on these platforms often violate expectations.
What curiosity’s led to
Coming full circle, since then, I’ve had the time of my life hosting and trying social experiments. The goal of each, attempting to tease out the dopaminergic craving for information from others and about each other. And the lessons I learned from each proved invaluable for many other segments of my life. My career, my friendships, entrepreneurship, just to name a few.
- Embracing and learning from the unknown in Brunches with Strangers
- Learning to build communities through 4 different social experiments
- My favorite questions on what makes us human from Hidden Questions
- The fallacy of persistence through responding to scams and spam emails
- And most recently, though I wouldn’t characterize it as an experiment, but an observation. The definition of value, and the value of time through how long people take to prepare for a talk.
I think I’ve gotten to a point where one of my most curious founder friends call the theory of snobbiness.
“Of the many things in this world, there will be a few that gets you inextricably excited. The more excited you get and the more you learn, the more snobby you become.”
Although I admit his choice of words could be better, as he was describing the two of us, he is the kind of person who relishes in self-deprecating humor. “Snobbiness” is only what happens when you exclude others from your journey of curiosity, by putting up unnecessary and pretentious barriers to entry. Rather, how fun would it be if we could all nerd out together? And make learning fun together?
So, stay curious! This time, I ask not just you, but help some others jump onto this adventure of exploration. And catalyze your and many others’ impetus to be the heroes of their journey.
Photo by Adam Nieścioruk on Unsplash
#unfiltered is a series where I share my raw thoughts and unfiltered commentary about anything and everything. It’s not designed to go down smoothly like the best cup of cappuccino you’ve ever had (although here‘s where I found mine), more like the lonely coffee bean still struggling to find its identity (which also may one day find its way into a more thesis-driven blogpost). Who knows? The possibilities are endless.
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