Please summarise: THE MYSTERIOUS
Teaching at a university is a really great job for all kinds of reasons. Yet there are inherent difficulties. They surface not only in the ongoing challenges of proper topic coverage within one’s courses, consistently updated lectures, and reliably fair examination/grading procedures, but also in a more basic way: in getting students to devote their full attention to the lecture material so that they comprehend the concepts involved. It’s a traditional problem because, first of all, the average class period lasts upward (sometimes far upward) of forty-five minutes, which is a long time to count on concentrated focus. Besides, these are college students at or near their peaks of sexual attractiveness and sexual inclination. How could we expect them to deny systematic attention to the eye-catchingly outfitted, viscerally stimulating romantic possibilities all around them in favor of the physically fading academic at the front of the room whose unfashionable “look” is relentlessly similar from session to session?

A number of years ago, while looking elsewhere, I came across an effective way to reduce the problem. It involves employing a combination of the Zeigarnik effect and what Albert Einstein proclaimed as “the most beautiful thing we can experience” and simultaneously “the source of all true science and art.”
I was preparing to write my first book for a general audience. Before beginning, I decided to go to the library to get all the books I could find that had been written by academics for nonacademics. My strategy was to read the books, identify what I felt were the most and least successful sections, photocopy those sections, and arrange them in separate piles. I then reread the entries, looking for particular qualities that differentiated the piles.
In the unsuccessful segments, I found the usual suspects: lack of clarity, stilted prose, use of jargon, and so on. In the successful group, I found pretty much what I expected, too: the polar-opposite traits of the weak sections plus logical structure, vivid examples, and humor. But I also found something I had not anticipated: the most successful of the pieces each began with a mystery story. The authors described a state of affairs that seemed perplexing and then invited the reader into the subsequent material as a way of dispatching the enigma.
In addition, there was something about this discovery that struck me as more than a little curious—something I’ll tee up, unashamedly, as a mystery: Why hadn’t I noticed the use of this technique before, much less its remarkably effective functioning in popularized scholarship? After all, I was at the time an avid consumer of such material. I had been buying and reading it for years. How could the recognition of this mechanism have eluded me the whole while?
The answer, I think, has to do with one reason the technique is so effective: it grabs readers by the collar and pulls them in to the material. When presented properly, mysteries are so compelling that the reader can’t remain an aloof outside observer of story structure and elements. 

In the throes of this particular literary device, one is not thinking of literary devices; one’s attention is magnetized to the mystery story because of its inherent, unresolved nature.
I saw evidence of the force of the craving for closure born within mystery stories after I began using them in my classroom lectures. I was still inexperienced enough that on one particular day I got the timing wrong, and the bell rang, ending the lecture before I’d revealed the solution to a puzzle I’d posed earlier. In every college course I’d ever taught, about five minutes before the scheduled end of a class period, some students start preparing to leave. The signs are visible, audible, and, consequently, contagious: pencils and notebooks are put away, laptops closed, backpacks zipped. But in this instance, not only were there no such preparations but also after the bell rang, no one moved. In fact, when I tried to end the lecture there, students pelted me with protests. They would not let me stop until I had given them closure on the mystery. I remember thinking, “Cialdini, you’ve stumbled onto dynamite here!”
Besides mystery stories being excellent communication devices for engaging and holding any audience’s interest, I encountered another reason to use them: they were instructionally superior to the other, more common forms of teaching I had been using, such as providing thoroughgoing descriptions of course material or asking questions about the material. Whereas descriptions require notice and questions require answers, mysteries require explanations. When I challenged students to engage in the process of providing explanations to account for states of affairs that otherwise wouldn’t make sense, their test scores went up. Why? Because that process also provided them the best chance to understand the lecture material in a meaningful and enduring way.46An example is in order. A little-recognized truth I often try to convey to various audiences is that, in contests of persuasion, counterarguments are typically more powerful than arguments. This superiority emerges especially when a counterclaim does more than refute a rival’s claim by showing it to be mistaken or misdirected in the particular instance, but does so instead by showing the rival communicator to be an untrustworthy source of information, generally. Issuing a counterargument demonstrating that an opponent’s argument is not to be believed because its maker is misinformed on the topic will usually succeed on that singular issue. But a counterargument that undermines an opponent’s argument by showing him or her to be dishonest in the matter will normally win that battle plus future battles with the opponent. In keeping with the holding power of puzzles, I’ve learned that I can arrange for an audience to comprehend those teaching points more profoundly if I present them in mystery-story format.
Of course, there are various ways to structure a mystery-story-based case for the potency of counterarguments. One that has worked well in my experience involves supplying the following information in the following sequence:

1. Pose the Mystery. Most people are familiar with legendary cigarette advertising campaign successes featuring Joe Camel, the Marlboro Man, and Virginia Slims’s “You’ve come a long way, baby.” But perhaps the most effective marketing decision ever made by the tobacco companies lies buried and almost unknown in the industry’s history: after a three-year slide of 10 percent in tobacco consumption in the United States during the late s, Big Tobacco did something that had the extraordinary effect of ending the decline and boosting consumption while slashing advertising expenditures by a third. What was it?

2. Deepen the Mystery. The answer also seems extraordinary. On July 22, 1969, during US congressional hearings, representatives of the major American tobacco companies strongly advocated a proposal to ban all of their own ads from television and radio, even though industry studies showed that the broadcast media provided the most effective routes to new sales. As a consequence of that unprecedented move, tobacco advertising has been absent from the airwaves in the United States since 1971.

3. Home In on the Proper Explanation by Considering (and Offering Evidence Against) Alternative Explanations. Could it be that American business interests, sobered by the 1964 Surgeon General’s report that detailed the deadly denouet of tobacco use, decided to forgo some of their profits to improve the well-being of fellow citizens? That appears unlikely, because representatives of the other major US business affected by the ban—the broadcast industry—filed suit in US Supreme Court to overturn the law one month after it was enacted. Thus, it was only the tobacco industry that supported the restriction on its ads. Could it have been the tobacco company executives, then, who became suddenly concerned with the health of the nation? Hardly. They didn’t reduce their concentrated efforts to increase tobacco sales one whit. They merely shifted their routes for marketing their products away from the broadcast media to print ads, sports sponsorships, promotional giveaways, and movie products. For instance, one tobacco company, Brown & Williamson, paid for product placements in twenty-two films in just a four-year period.

4. Provide a Clue to the Proper Explanation. So, by tobacco executives’ logic, magazines, newspapers, billboards, and films were fair game; only the airwaves should be off-limits to their marketing efforts. What was special about the broadcast media? In 1967, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had ruled that its “fairness doctrine” applied to the issue of tobacco advertising. The fairness doctrine required that equal advertising time be granted on radio and television—solely on radio and television—to all sides of important and controversial topics. If one side purchased broadcast time on these media, the opposing side must be given free time to counterargue.

5. Resolve the Mystery. That decision had an immediate impact on the landscape of broadcast advertising. For the first time, anti-tobacco forces such as the American Cancer Society could afford to air counterarguments to the tobacco company messages. They did so via counter-ads that disputed the truthfulness of the images displayed in tobacco company commercials. If a tobacco ad featured healthy, attractive, independent characters, the opposing ads would counterargue that, in fact, tobacco use led to diseased health, damaged attractiveness, and slavish dependence.
During the three years that they ran, those anti-tobacco spots slashed tobacco consumption in the United States by nearly 10 percent. At first the tobacco companies responded predictably, increasing their advertising budgets to try to meet the challenge. But, by the rules of the fairness doctrine, for each tobacco ad, equal time had to be provided for a counter-ad that would take another bite out of industry profits. When the logic of the situation hit them, the tobacco companies worked politically to ban their own ads, but solely on the air where the fairness doctrine applied—thereby ensuring that the anti-tobacco forces would no longer get free airtime to make their counterargument. As a consequence, in the year following the elimination of tobacco commercials on air, the tobacco companies witnessed a significant jump in sales coupled with a significant reduction in advertising expenditures.

6. Draw the Implication for the Phenomenon Under Study. Tobacco opponents found that they could use counterarguments to undercut tobacco ad effectiveness. But the tobacco executives learned (and profited from) a related lesson: one of the best ways to enhance audience acceptance of one’s message is to reduce the availability of strong counterarguments to it—because counterarguments are typically more powerful than arguments.
At this stage in the sequence, the teaching point about the superior impact and necessary availability of counterarguments is an explanation. As such, it produces more than recognition of basic facts (for example, “US tobacco companies argued successfully for a ban of their ads from TV and radio”) or answers to related questions (“What was the result? The companies witnessed a jump in sales and a reduction in advertising costs”). It produces an understanding of how certain psychological processes associated with the prepotency of counterarguments brought about both of those otherwise baffling events. 47, 48

Notice that this type of explanation offers not just any satisfying conceptual account. Owing to its intrigue-fueled form, it carries a bonus. It’s part of a presentational approach constituted to attract audiences to the fine points of the information—because to resolve any mystery or detective story properly, observers have to be aware of all the relevant details. Think of it: we have something available to us here that not only keeps audience members focused generally on the issues at hand but also makes them want to pay attention to the details—the necessary but often boring and attention-deflecting particulars—of our material. What more could a communicator with a strong but intricate case want?

Oh, by the way, there’s a telling answer to the question of what Albert Einstein claimed was so remarkable it could be labeled as both “the most beautiful thing we can experience” and “the source of all true science and art.” His contention: the mysterious.

47: This sequence should not be approached by providing it to an audience as a set of pronouncements delivered from a pulpit. Instead, at appropriate intervals, audience members should be invited into the process of discovery. Optimally, they should be given the opportunity to offer their own speculations and explanations. They should be asked to consider how these explanations could account for all of the evidence revealed to that point and for new pieces of evidence as you reveal them. At the end of the se- quence, they should be asked if they could deve- lop an alternative explanation that fits all of the evidence. This is not an application that deser- ves special treatment here. It's just good instructional practice, especially with adults. And good instructional practice—getting participation, spurring critical thinking—applies to the use of mystery stories, too.
48: There is documentation for the remarkable set of events that began in the mid-1960s when the Federal Communications Commission appli- 
ed its "fairness doctrine" to the issue of tobacco advertising—decreeing that for every three tobacco ads that appeared on radio or TV, free air- 
time had to be given to one ad espousing opposing views—which enabled the American Cancer Society to run a series of counter-ads that satirized and parodied those of Big Tobacco. From their first appearance in 1967, the counter-ads began to undercut tobacco sales. After a quarter-century climb, per capita consumption dropped precipitously in that initial year and continued to sink during the three years that these anti-tobacco ads were aired. The majority of the decline has since been traced to the impact of the counter-ads; accordingly, when these ads ended, so for a time did the attendant decrease in tobacco consumption (Fritschler, 1975; McAlister, Ramirez, Galavotti, and Gallion, 1989; Simonich, 1991; and Warner, 1981).