By making people work just a little harder, question pitches prompt people to come up with their own reasons for agreeing (or not). And when people summon their own reasons for believing something, they endorse the belief more strongly and become more likely to act on it.

The researchers discovered that participants based their decisions on two factors: utility and curiosity.

People opened useful messages for extrinsic reasons; they had something to gain or lose. They opened the other messages for intrinsic reasons; they were just curious.

But the successful seller must feel some commitment that his product offers mankind as much altruistic benefit as it yields the seller in money.

For McClintock, money and resources became the means to do her research, rather than her research being a means to make money. Every person in our study made this flip at some point in their lives, from seeing money principally as the output of their efforts (“I work to make money”) to seeing money as an input to fuel their efforts (“I need money to do what I am encoded for”).