Does It Hold Up?

Does opening with a shocking statistic make it stick?

The advice

Lead with the most surprising number you have, because surprise makes it memorable. In the study below, surprise did help people remember a number, but only when they'd guessed before they saw it.

What the researchers did

In 2022, Garvin Brod and four colleagues ran two experiments with trivia facts written as "X out of 10," which works like a percentage. They used 90 facts that participants almost never knew beforehand.

The first experiment had 24 students aged 10 to 14. For some facts, they gave a guess before the answer appeared. For the others, they saw the answer first and then gave the guess they would have made. That second setup is called post hoc, meaning after the fact. Later, all 24 were tested on which answers they remembered.

The second experiment had 29 university students who guessed first on every fact, while an eye tracker measured the size of their pupils. The researchers used the change in pupil size as a physical measure of surprise that didn't depend on what people said, and the paper calls it the pupillary surprise response.

What held up

When people guessed first, the facts that were furthest from their guess were among the best remembered. Memory was good for answers close to the guess, dipped in the middle, and rose again for the answers that were way off. In the second experiment, a bigger pupil response to a very surprising answer predicted that the person would remember it.

There's a larger study pointing the same way. In 2021, Steven Pan and Faria Sana ran five experiments with 1,573 people combined, who read short informational passages. Answering questions about a passage before reading it led to higher scores on a later test than answering the same kind of questions after reading, whether that test came 5 minutes or 48 hours later. Answering a question before you've learned the answer is called pretesting.

What didn't hold up

In the first experiment's post hoc condition, where the students saw the number before giving a guess, memory got worse as the facts got more surprising.

Where this stops applying

These are two small experiments, 53 people in total, with trivia on a screen in a research setting. Every participant actually gave an answer before seeing the fact. Someone watching your video can hear a question and keep scrolling without answering it, and neither study tested that. Pan and Sana's study used text passages and quiz questions, which isn't a video either.

What to do with it

Put one line in front of the number that asks for a specific guess with a range, like "Out of 10 [people in your example], how many do you think [did the thing]?" Give a beat of silence, then say the real number. The study's facts all had answers from 1 to 9, so a question shaped like theirs gives the viewer a number to commit to. Only use a statistic you've opened the source for. The whole finding is that guessing first makes a number easier to remember, and that works the same way on a number that's wrong.

Next step

The free Psychology-Driven Content Playbook has hook formulas for the first three seconds of a video, so you can build this guess line into one of them. It's at datapsych.net/free.

Sources