Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected by Lee Ann Renninger PhD

Author:Lee Ann Renninger PhD [Renninger PhD, Lee Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

GETTING ATTENTION

As Laozi has said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. In the same way, the journey to sustained attention begins with those few seconds in which you capture transient attention. The two most effective tools we know for getting attention are interrupting patterns and creating knowledge gaps.

Interrupt Patterns

Dog dog dog dog dog dog dog cat dog dog dog dog dog dog dog.

Even if you are a dog lover, we bet the cat in the previous sentence got your attention. There’s nothing particularly special about this cat other than the fact that he created a pattern interrupt. Your brain was expecting more dogs, so it was surprised to encounter a cat. This slight surprise was enough to momentarily snare your attention.

On a physiological level, the less surprising something is, the less we feel it. Imagine sitting in the movies and holding hands with someone special. At first the sensation is new and exciting, but after just a few minutes your brain becomes habituated, and you literally cannot feel the hand you’re holding. To regain the sensation, you have to interrupt the pattern and change your hand position. Habituation makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Our ancestors survived because they prioritized new, unexpected information over familiar information. Familiarity is safe. Novelty is risky—full of both danger and opportunity.

Pattern interrupts get our attention in all walks of life, from public awareness campaigns to music. To understand why some music has an attention-gripping and chill-producing effect on listeners, researchers had participants listen to music while monitoring their heart rate and sweat levels.10 The moments that produced a sudden physiological shift in listeners and a subjective feeling of chills had two things in common: an increase in volume from soft to loud and a sudden shift from a solo instrument (such as a violin) to the orchestra (for example, strings and woodwinds). The researchers wrote, “The music went through a harmonic progression that briefly deviated from a pattern that could have been expected based on the previous section.”

To harness the power of pattern interrupts, create a pattern then give it a twist. Instructors can spend ten minutes on an exercise then have students swap seats. Designers can use a consistent color then add a splash of something unexpected. Cooks can sneak unusual bursts of flavor into an otherwise ordinary dish. Writers can craft several long sentences. Then a short one.

You can also take advantage of preexisting patterns and devise ways to interrupt them. Like Hutch, the dancing traffic enforcer. We expect a lot of behaviors from someone directing traffic but the shimmy isn’t one of them. The pattern you interrupt can be small, like changing the way you answer the phone, or it can be elaborate, like Volkswagen’s Fun Theory challenge. Participants in this playful contest had to capture people’s attention by turning something boring into something fun. One team achieved this goal by interrupting the staircase pattern. Members of the team wanted to bring attention to the stairs and away from the escalator.

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