How to use the Curiosity Gap to improve your message

Harnessing cognitive discomfort to rewrite a video script

Do you know what a curiosity gap is?

It’s a concept that was popularized in the classic business book, Made to Stick by the Heath brothers, and it’s a brilliant concept I’ve been deploying with higher frequency as I try to get my content to resonate.

The idea is this: curiosity arises when there is a gap in our knowledge. This gap creates a sense of discomfort, or an “itch” that we feel compelled to scratch by seeking out the missing information. That’s because when we become aware of the gap, it creates a sense of cognitive discomfort that drives us to find the missing information to restore cognitive equilibrium.

You’ve likely seen this in action when consuming engaging content online. It’s the hook in the first line of your favourite LinkedIn writer. Or the opening frame of your favourite TikTok creator who manages to hook you in from the opening frame.

But in my experience, you rarely see it in public affairs content. Most public affairs campaigns I’ve come across (including my own!) have a bad habit of leading with the problem or the facts. I’ve spent the last year experimenting with different ways to engage people, and I’ve become bullish on gamified experiences because of their ability to use the curiosity gap to hook audiences in, and get them to consider an idea. The benefits are significant:

• When people are aware of a gap in knowledge, they become more engaged and curious about the outcome. This engagement leads to better retention of information because the process of seeking out answers makes the information more memorable.

We’re going to work with the curiosity gap in this week’s guide by way of a video script. At the end of the guide, I provide a link to an example of me using these prompts to work on a a hypothetical explainer video about the role of plastics in the medical field.

While I’ve structured this guide sequentially, it also works well as an à la carte menu. You could work with any combination of these prompts, depending on how advanced your are with your script.

And a final note before we start: I’d use these prompts for inspiration and ideation. In my experience, ChatGPT rarely writes exceptional scripts out of the gate. You’ll see in some of the screenshots I’ve provided below that it does a great job of findings hooks and helping me work through how to present my information using the curiosity gap, but its scripting sometimes reads like something a first-year political science student would write. You’ll need to polish.

Let’s get on with the show!