The Art and Science of Achieving Universal Appeal

If I could select one superpower, I wouldn’t choose to fly, time travel, or read minds, I would select universal appeal, the ability to makes friends and connect with anyone, anywhere. But in an age of diminished attention spans, how does one firmly establish a positive connection?

Everything about you could be appealing to people you engage with, but if you are unable to catch their attention long enough to prove it, opportunities to connect are lost.  As such, catching someone’s attention is the first challenge.  

Ben Parr, American journalist, venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and author of Captivology: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention (HarperOne, 2015) provides a fresh perspective on how catching attention is a central component of the modern economy. He goes one step further to assert our ability to gain attention is the “currency of the modern economy.” When considered through the lens of interpersonal interactions, the research he presents provides practical advice for gaining attention in an age of diminished attention spans. 

Parr focuses on human attention as “predictable and quantifiable responses in the mind,” and cites many examples of how the responses can be leveraged to capture and maintain attention for people, products or ideas. He calls them, “captivation triggers,” and boils them down into seven categories:

Automaticity Trigger: Unconscious tendency to shift our attention toward the sights, sounds, and other sensory cues important to our survival. Parr refers to this as immediate attention, and relates this trigger to hard-wired survival instincts and how our attention automatically will turn to things that stand out as we’re hyper vigilant to threats. In a field of gazelles, the lion has our attention.

Framing Trigger: Leveraging cognitive bias to adapt or change an individual’s view of the world so they pay more attention to you. The framing trigger sets the stage for all other captivation triggers. A blog post begins by confirming some of your beliefs and, in turn, gains your attention.  

Disruption Trigger: Changing the status quo by violating and disrupting expectations. Parr highlights simplicity, surprise, and significance in context as key ingredients for leveraging this trigger. In a conversation, imagine that person that asks an unexpected question—it is a pattern interruption that gains attention.

Reward Trigger: Leveraging people’s desire and motivation for an intrinsic or extrinsic reward. According to Parr, ideally the reward will solve someone’s problem. “Give me enough medals and I’ll win you any war,” Napoleon Bonaparte once said. Clearly rewards had his attention.     

Reputation Trigger: Using experts, consensus, or authorities to instill trust and captivate audiences. Parr encourages people to be aware of this trigger and not to be afraid to make independent judgments.  Think of the name dropper.

Mystery Trigger: Using suspense and uncertainty to keep an audience intrigued. Parr notes that we have a compulsion for completion. Think of a compelling story opening. It draws you in and you want to know how it ends. 

Acknowledgement Trigger: People pay attention to the people who recognize, validate, and empathize with them in some way. It’s why the key to being interesting is being curious.

Parr lays out a fairly comprehensive view of how people can go about capturing attention for themselves, ideas, causes, or products. He provides useful information that applies throughout the lifecycle of interpersonal relationships and addresses not only how people gain initial attention in an interaction, but also how to sustain relationships over the long run.

But captivating someone’s attention does not necessarily establish the basis for a positive relationship. Parr does little to address rapport or the relational chemistry between people. In his effort to bin the various related studies and techniques into seven categories, Parr fails to adequately address the power of storytelling, logic, environmental and contextual considerations, humor, emotional intelligence and reciprocation in building connections.

Parr has our attention now, so what will he do with it? My hope is he continues to move from concept to refined application to provide practical advice for those looking for the superpower of universal appeal.

Randall Trani, a career civil servant at the Defense Intelligence Agency, Army veteran and former diplomat, attends Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Connect on Twitter @randall_trani. The views expressed are his own and do not represent the views of DIA or any other government agency.