Abstract
<p>Psychological theories have identified conditions that promote curiosity, including novelty, ambiguity, uncertainty, incongruity, and perceived knowledge gaps. Less is known about how communicators construct these conditions through message design. We introduce curiosity scaffolding to describe communicative structures that create or heighten conditions capable of eliciting curiosity and sustaining engagement. Across three studies, we tested this framework using narrative openings as a model system. Study 1 used a theory-guided inductive analysis of bestselling fiction to identify five recurring communicative structures that appeared to scaffold curiosity. Study 2 translated these structures into experimental manipulations and showed that passages containing them elicited greater curiosity than closely matched control passages. Study 3 showed that readers preferentially selected curiosity-scaffolding passages. Together, the findings distinguish the psychological conditions associated with curiosity from the communicative structures through which those conditions are constructed and provide a discovery-to-validation framework for studying curiosity as an outcome of communicative design.</p>