Curiosity Is Contagious: A Social Influence Intervention to Induce Curiosity.

ABSTRACT: Our actions and decisions are regularly influenced by the social environment around us. Can social cues be leveraged to induce curiosity and affect subsequent behavior? Across two experiments, we show that curiosity is contagious: The social environment can influence people's curiosity about the answers to scientific questions. Participants were presented with everyday questions about science from a popular on-line forum, and these were shown with a high or low number of up-votes as a social cue to popularity. Participants indicated their curiosity about the answers, and they were given an opportunity to reveal a subset of those answers. Participants reported greater curiosity about the answers to questions when the questions were presented with a high (vs. low) number of up-votes, and the

SUBMITTER: Dubey R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7900967 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature