The Science of Suspense: Why That Confusing Ad Is Genius!
Psych 🧠- 337/500
Hey Reader,
Have you tried the Shortform app yet? I’d love to know what books you are reading!
ICYMI, Shortform provides the world’s best guides to non-fiction books. They’re like book summaries on steroids!
Plus, they’re offering a free trial with a 20% discount on annual subscription.
What is it?
It challenges the common assumption that curiosity leads to increased scrutiny and skepticism, arguing instead that the process of inducing and then resolving curiosity can actually reduce skepticism and improve product attitudes.
This effect is attributed to the positive affect experienced when curiosity is satisfied.
Major findings:
Curiosity reduces skepticism: Both in a real-world setting with cosmetics advertisements and in lab experiments using word puzzles, inducing and resolving curiosity led to lower levels of consumer skepticism.
Improved product attitudes and purchase intentions: This reduced skepticism, in turn, resulted in more favorable attitudes towards the advertised product and increased purchase intentions.
Positive affect is the mechanism: The positive feeling experienced when curiosity is resolved appears to mediate the reduction in skepticism and the improved product evaluations.
🤯 The Only Book You Need to Master Psychology!
The Psych Handbook has 150+ biases & fallacies explained with emojis!
Or an Amazon Kindle copy from here.
What do I need to know:
By demonstrating that curiosity can be leveraged to reduce skepticism and improve product evaluations, the findings offer actionable insights for marketers and open up new avenues for research into the dynamics of curiosity, affect, and consumer behavior.
Curiosity can be a powerful persuasion tool: Evoking and resolving curiosity can be an effective way to reduce skepticism and enhance consumer receptivity to advertising messages.
Positive affect plays a key role: The pleasurable feeling of satisfying curiosity fosters a positive emotional state that spills over to product evaluations.
Incidental curiosity can influence unrelated judgments: Curiosity elicited by one stimulus can impact evaluations of a completely different object, highlighting the broad influence of affective states.
Strategic information disclosure is crucial: Gradually revealing information to create and resolve curiosity is more effective than simply presenting all details upfront.
Source: