In the face of uncertainty — whether thanks to changing technologies, pathogens, or conflict — leaders need to effectively communicate new information to broad audiences and generate continued interest in what they have to say. What’s the best way to do this? This is the question researchers at the Behavior Change for Good Initiative (BCFG), led by Wharton professors Katy Milkman and Angela Duckworth, sought to answer in a recently published research paper spurred by the challenge of communicating new facts about COVID-19 at the start of the pandemic.
In 2020, Milkman enlisted her then graduate student Erika Kirgios (now a professor at the University of Chicago) to lead a project in partnership with several professors from other top research universities testing a fresh idea: If the goal is to build continued interest in a topic, it might be better to first tease people with a question, later revealing the fact in the form of an answer to that question, rather than sharing new facts directly. To test this possibility, Kirgios, Milkman, Duckworth, and collaborators ran large scale experiments in both Ghana and Michigan early on during the COVID pandemic designed to share information about how people could protect themselves from the disease. The results were surprising.
Providing facts in a Q&A format produced an exciting benefit. For example, questions like “If you and another person are masked, do you still need to stay 1m apart?” changed downstream behavior more than direct statements like “Even if you and another person are masked, you need to stay 1m apart.” What kind of downstream behavior change? The researchers measured how many message recipients in either condition sought more information on related topics when offered an opportunity to keep learning.
The authors note that in some ways, the results are surprising because past research has proven that friction is bad. Any barrier to acquiring information — like complex language on a form or an extra click to get an answer online — makes it less likely that people will consume or comprehend the information.
“Behavioral science shows us that you want to make it as simple and easy as possible for people to gain information and access to resources,” Milkman said. “But we had this idea that when people are inundated with information, it’s easy to ignore it. Sometimes, a little friction in the form of a question posed before an answer is provided can create curiosity and a desire for answers.”
The study, published in 2025, is titled “Does Q&A Boost Engagement? Health Messaging Experiments in Michigan and Ghana.” The research began in Ghana with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the team later worked with the state of Michigan. See below for the full list of co-authors.
“Sometimes, a little friction in the form of a question posed before an answer is provided can create curiosity and a desire for answers.”— Katy Milkman
More Questions, More Curiosity
In both Ghana and Michigan, question-answer texts significantly increased information seeking on related topics. In Michigan, such texts also led recipients to report they were more likely to change their behavior to stay safe from the novel pathogen.
One other ancillary finding from the research in Michigan was that the more texts participants received (regardless of experimental condition), the more likely they were to opt out from receiving subsequent messages, highlighting a risk of bombarding people with informational messages of any kind.
The authors followed up with a third experiment on social media, running monthlong ad campaigns on Facebook about the benefits of vaccination. The ads reached nearly one million Facebook users and appeared in their feeds delivering a message in either a Q&A format or as a direct statement that was intended to encourage a visit to the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) website. The study found that Q&A ads generated 9% to 11% more clicks to the CDC website per dollar spent than ads that directly stated information about vaccines.
Milkman said the social media experiment was less surprising to her than the first two experiments because generating clicks to find the answer to a question is intuitive. However, the first two studies demonstrated that even after a question has been answered, people are inspired to learn more about the same topic when the original knowledge they obtained arrived in a different format.
“You want to keep them asking questions and looking for more.”— Katy Milkman
Q&A and AI Chatbots
Milkman acknowledges that this research is not perfect and hopes follow-up studies will be conducted looking at other types of information sharing. She noted the 2020-2022 timing of the study, which was during the height of the pandemic and all its urgency.
“We were trying so hard to help during COVID, and we had to act fast,” she said. “So these studies in Ghana and Michigan came together rapidly.”
Still, Milkman said, the overall results of the project are important and should be widely applicable. Posing a question before sharing the answer can help spur more interest in a wide range of topics, from public health to financial literacy to climate change to education to just about anything. This approach could even impact the way chatbots are designed to interact with humans seeking information.
“There’s a constant need for public service announcements, and we stick it on a billboard or send them in a text or an email. This paper shows we could do better if we can create these interactive, quiz-like messages to get people interested in going beyond this one nugget of information,” Milkman said. “You want to keep them asking questions and looking for more.”
Co-authors of the paper are Katy Milkman, operations, information and decisions (OID) professor at Wharton; Angela Duckworth, OID professor at Wharton and psychology professor at Penn; Erika Kirgios, behavioral science professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business; Susan Athey, economics professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business; Dean Karlan; finance professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management; Michael Luca, economics professor at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School; and Molly Offer-Westort, political science professor at the University of Chicago.
