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We can’t expect learners to pay attention if we’re relying on their willpower alone. Here are nine attentiongrabbing techniques from Julie Dirksen.
TALK TO THE ELEPHANT: HOW TO ATTRACT AND MAINTAIN YOUR LEARNER’S ATTENTION
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ave you ever heard that the ‘average adult attention span is no more than ten-minutes’. Maybe you’ve heard it is 15 minutes, or 45? If you think about it, this is just silly. If it were true, nobody would have sat through the Lord of the Rings movies. What is much more limited than attention span, is the length of time someone can force themselves to pay attention. If your audience is happily romping with the Hobbits, attentiveness is easy. If you’re asking your users to pay attention to the procedures for their health savings account, then the clock is probably ticking. You might be lucky to get ten minutes. So, if you want attention, you need to talk to the elephant.
Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Happiness Hypothesis, talks about the brain being like a rider and an elephant: ‘the rider is conscious, controlled thought. The elephant, in contrast, is everything else. The elephant includes gut feelings, visceral reactions, emotions and intuitions that comprise much of the automatic system.’ The rider part of your brain is the rational, Mr. Spock, control-your-impulses, plan-forthe-future brain. Your rider tells you all sorts of useful things that you know will provide long-term benefit: “If I exercise now, I’ll have more energy later”. The elephant, on the other hand, is your attracted-to-shiny-objects brain. It is your
what-the-hell, go-with-what-feels-right part of the brain. It’s drawn to things that are novel, pleasurable, comfortable or familiar: I’m just going to lie down on the couch for one minute’. The elephant WANTS, but the rider restrains that wanting. Part of the problem, though, is we have a tendency to overestimate the rider’s control. The rider is our conscious verbal thinking and because it talks to us, we tend to think it’s in control. But the elephant is bigger and stronger than the rider. DRAGGING THE ELEPHANT The rider can force the elephant to pay attention. We do it all the time. But there’s a
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TALK TO THE ELEPHANT: HOW TO ATTRACT AND MAINTAIN YOUR LEARNER’S ATTENTION
Elephant: The automatic, emotional, visceral brain
Rider: The conscious, verbal, thinking brain
avoid lip balm’, ‘the surprising truth about minivans’. The AOL evil geniuses incite my curiosity. It’s a shallow curiosity, but it still gets me to click on their link. George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology, describes curiosity as: “Arising when attention becomes focused on a gap in one’s knowledge. The curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation.” If you want to make the elephant curious, ask yourself ‘what information can I leave out?’
7. Create dissonance
cost to this. In a study by Professors Baba Shiv and Alexander Fedorikhin, participants were asked to remember either a two-digit or a seven-digit number. They were subsequently offered a snack choice of either fruit salad or a piece of cake.
antagonist who is preventing the protagonist from accomplishing that goal. Have obstacles along the way that the protagonist must overcome. Have an inciting incident that sets up the drama of the story.
Approximately twice as many people chose cake in the seven-digit group as in the twodigit group. This, and several similar studies, suggests that the cognitive resources of memory, focus and control are finite. You can control the elephant, but not for very long. We can’t expect our audience to pay attention throughout if we are relying on their willpower alone. We need to attract the elephant. Here are nine ways to attract and maintain attention...
4. Create interesting dilemmas
1. Use urgency The elephant is a creature of immediacy. It’s pretty content to let the rider worry about the future. Things that are going to happen in the future, regardless of how dire they are, are less compelling to the elephant than things that are happening RIGHT NOW. If you are talking to teens about smoking, the immediate social consequences are far more compelling than the hypothetical health issues that could occur years down the line.
2. Show, don’t tell The elephant is pretty smart. It’s just not going to just believe that something is important. It wants to SEE and FEEL the importance. This is one of the golden rules of fiction writing and movie making – avoid heavy-handed exposition, and use visuals, action and dialogue instead. You can tell the rider that ‘this is really important’ but the elephant wants to see proof – it’s not going to take your word for it.
3. Tell a compelling story Use classic storytelling elements to create a compelling scenario. Have a protagonist who is trying to accomplish a goal. Have an
Give your audience interesting choices to make. Dilemmas will capture interest if they are done well. Instead of telling people all the things they can do to conserve electricity, give them five options and have them figure which three will give them the most energy savings – let them debate the benefit of energy-saving light bulbs versus insulating the water heater.
5. Surprise it When researchers test people using expected and unexpected rewards, there is greater activation of anticipation and rewards structures in the brain when the reward is unexpected. Compare the feeling you get on receiving the birthday card that comes with five dollars from Grandmother every year, to the feeling of finding five dollars lying on the ground, with no obvious owner in sight. It’s a case of ‘that’s nice’ versus ‘woo hoo’! It’s the same amount of money, but the reaction is very different, due to the surprise. If something is unexpectedly good, we want to remember it because we want MORE. If something is BAD, we want to remember that too, so we can avoid it in the future. But if something is exactly the way we thought it would be, there’s really no reason to allocate mental resources to reinforcing it.
6. Leave information out My mother still uses AOL mail, and the AOL home page has a devious way of leaving out just enough information to get me to follow article links, for things that I don’t care about at all. Links such as: ‘which 80s child star now has three wives?’, ‘eight reasons to
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Another form of surprise happens when we bump into something that doesn’t resonate with our view of the world. Let’s say, you are walking down the street and you see a purple dog. You probably have a pretty detailed mental model for dogs, but unless you have a traumatic dog-painting incident in your childhood, you probably don’t have ‘purple’ as part of your model. Now you have two opposing ideas in your head: ‘that’s a purple dog’ and ‘dogs are not purple.’ The term for this is cognitive dissonance. It is stuff that just doesn’t add up based on what you know about the world. You need to reconcile those two opposing viewpoints but how do you go about this? Explanations could include: Somebody spray-painted that poor dog, I’m seeing things, and maybe purple dogs do exist. In the last example, you are considering whether to reconcile and expand your mental model to include dogs that are purple. When you create these moments of cognitive dissonance, you can really attract the elephant.
8. Make it visceral We live in a world full of abstractions – credit cards stand in for actual money, virtual selves stand in for our actual selves, statistics stand in for actual people. This is necessary for our modern society to operate efficiently, but abstractions speak to the rider, not the elephant. One way to engage the elephant is to make the experience visceral and real using emotional context or physical interaction with real tangible objects and people. In the fruit salad versus cake experiment, people were more likely to take the cake if they could see it, rather than being presented with an abstract choice.
9. Tell it that all the other elephants are doing it We all have tremendous demands on our attention, and one of the shortcuts we use to determine how to allocate that attention is to see what other people are doing. From
Resources
Hey, what are those elephants doing over there? Something good??
• Cialdini, Robert. 2005. What’s the best secret device for engaging student interest? The answer is in the title. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 24 (1): 22–29. • Gailliot, M.T., R.F. Baumeister, C.N. DeWall, J.K. Maner, E.A. Plant, D.M. Tice, L.E. Brewer, and B.J. Schmeichel. 2007. Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: Willpower is more than a metaphor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92: 325–336.
process? Can you make sure that people’s success stories are visible and accessible?
Amazon reviews to street crowds to topics on Twitter, we are more willing to investigate if other people (particularly other people we know or respect) are already engaged. If you are trying to engage the elephant, think about how to make other people’s interests or experiences visible to the elephant. Can they see other people using a new product, or trying a new
To win and maintain your audience’s attention, you need to talk to the emotional, visceral brain, as well as the conscious verbal brain. If you can succeed in doing so, your audience will find that paying attention will feel relatively effortless. If you don’t succeed, then you probably will want to keep your communication under that ‘ten-minute attention span’ mark. Extract from an article published at www.peachpit.com
• Haidt, Jonathan Haidt. 2006. The Happiness Hypothesis. New York: Basic Books • Shiv, Baba, Fedorikhin, Alexander. Heart and Mind in Conflict: The Interplay of Affect and Cognition in Consumer Decision Making. Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 26, No. 3 (December 1999), pp. 278-292
Julie Dirksen is an independent learning consultant Twitter: @usablelearning Blog: http://usablelearning.com/blog
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