logged
The meaningless coin flip
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have the ability to get people to try your offers willingly?
Even if they weren’t sure they’d get results?
And whether they did or didn’t… they’d still be happy they tried?
Well, let’s look none other than to the ridiculous power of suspense as it was revealed to me in Matthew Dick’s latest book, Stories Sell…
In a study published in the July 2023 Proceedings of the Royal Society, researchers told participants, “I’m going to flip a meaningless coin, and generate a meaningless result, but I’m not going to tell you the result unless you let me hurt you.”
Learning the outcome of the coin flip had no real bearing on the participants life.
It didn’t help them or hurt them.
It didn’t change their life in any meaningful way…
Or did it? Apparently, many people still wanted to know the result, and many of them willingly agreed to the pain.
At the lowest pain setting, 75% of people chose the pain to get the information.
And at the maximum? Still half of the participants were willing to experience pain to gain information that was useless to them.
Now here's why this matters for your marketing:
Most people approach their content like a Wikipedia entry.
They lead with the answer. They organize information by topic. They aim for completeness over curiosity.
But here's the thing…
Nobody's buying because you gave them complete information.
They're buying because you’ve shown them a gap between what they know and what they need to know. Inside that gap lies the experience of tension. In general, people want to avoid making other people experience tension.
Perhaps it feels manipulative, unethical, or wrong…
But the truth is, tension is the only thing that truly causes people to take healthy action to improve their lives. And tension is what keeps people reading your emails, clicking your links, and showing up for your offers again and again. And tension is what makes life truly interesting (and not just predictable and boring).
The coin flip study proves it:
Humans will literally pay in pain just to close an open loop.
So if you’re writing, posting, emailing and it’s not becoming clients?
Check for suspense.
Are you opening loops and delaying the payoff? Are you starting in the middle of something happening instead of explaining from the beginning? Are you making people curious about what comes next?
Because if you're just handing them the answer upfront, you're working against 200,000 years of human psychology.
All to say…
Here's a question I can't answer for you:
What would your business look like six months from now if you actually understood how to use curiosity, tension, and psychology in your marketing?
I don't know.
But I do know this:
The people who work with me directly tend to figure it out faster than the ones who don't.
So if you want to find out what happens when you stop explaining and start creating suspense in your content, join the TNM community and grab a discovery call to see whether it makes sense to grab a spot on the VIP list:
Your pal,
Kevin Hood