curiosity gap
n. The difference between what a person knows and what that person wants to know.
Examples
2014
In her experiment she discovered that shorter profiles are also better. "Women that you would want to be friends with had profiles of like 3,000 words, but to be good at online dating you should create a curiosity gap."
—Ariel Bogle, “The Algorithm Knows What the Heart Wants: A Future Tense Event Recap,” Slate Magazine, February 21, 2014
2013
There is an amygdala-tickling genius here, but also a kind of movie-trailer mawkishness. What’s the "secret"? An entertaining slideshow of Upworthy’s headline-writing strategies last year repeatedly references the "curiosity gap." The idea is both to share just enough that readers know what they’re clicking and to withhold just enough to compel the click.
—Derek Thompson, “Upworthy: I Thought This Website Was Crazy, but What Happened Next Changed Everything,” The Atlantic, November 14, 2013
1995 (earliest)
This piece won’t answer all your questions (like the residual effect on flora and fauna, which isn’t an archeological issue), but it manages to fill a bit of the curiosity gap that still exists in one corner of that intensely strange time.
—Christopher Harris, “Magazines,” The Globe and Mail (Canada), May 08, 1995
Notes
Like other types of gaps in attainments, an information gap can be defined by two quantities: what one knows and what one wants to know.
—George Lowenstein, “The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation,” Psychological Bulletin, July 01, 1994