How I got 25 million people to watch a movie about a science they reject
The Info Sandwich: A way to make facts palatable to the fact-hostile
Various sandwich analogies for communication techniques have been around for a while. Two of the most familiar:
The compliment sandwich: Deliver criticism, such as a poor performance review, in between two compliments.
The truth sandwich: Explain misinformation by bookending it with factual information.
Both are commonly recommended; both have shown little evidence of being effective. People tend to smell the compliment sandwich coming a mile away. Even while the initial compliment is still underway they’re already telling themselves “Oh boy, here it comes.”
The truth sandwich has simply failed to prove itself any better than doing nothing at correcting misinformation in empirical studies.1
Yet I have often spoken of how my entire film The UFO Movie THEY Don’t Want You to See was deliberately written using a sandwich format — a sort of unique recipe of sandwich. I was neither delivering criticism nor correcting misinformation; my goal in this film was to present factual information that I knew the majority of the audience would be hostile to. So I opted for the following layers of my sandwich:
