Your liking is my curiosity: a social popularity intervention to induce curiosity

Year of Conference
2018

Type

Conference Proceedings
Abstract

Our actions and decisions are regularly influenced by the social environment around us. Can social environment be leveraged to induce curiosity and facilitate subsequent learning? Across two experiments, we show that curiosity is contagious: social environment can influence people's curiosity about the answers to scientific questions. Our findings show that people are more likely to become curious about the answers to more popular questions, which in turn influences the information they choose to reveal. Given that curiosity has been linked to better learning, these findings have important implications for education.

Conference Name
Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society
Pages
756-761
Publisher
Cognitive Science Society
Documents