Three Styles of Curiosity
With the help of Wikipedia, social researchers identified three methods curious people use to learn information.
Hiya!
Our species is known for many things, including our contradictory behaviors. For instance, we like to believe we’re rational creatures who make logical, sensible decisions when the truth is we’re far more emotional and irrational — and no amount of ignoring, avoiding, or bottling our emotions away can change that.
In our reductive investigations of human emotions, researchers have deemed happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise as our six dominant ones. However, they’ve also identified at least 27 distinct categories of emotions that we experience. (Did you catch that? Not just 27 emotions, but 27 categories of emotions.)
Now, researchers are diving deeper into specific emotions to understand their intricacies better. Some are even making careers out of it. Think of Brené Brown, renowned for her research and expertise about shame, and now, there’s Dani Bassett, who has dedicated their career to studying one of my favorite emotions: curiosity.
The Curiosity that Inspired Their Curiosity About Curiosity
Today’s story involves Bassett, a physicist, systems neuroscientist, and University of Pennsylvania network scientist, and their twin brother, Perry Zurn, a professor of philosophy at American University, a private federally chartered research university in Washington, D.C.
In a recent article, Bassett shared with Gary Stix of Scientific American that in 2016, they and Zurn noticed that while plenty of previous academic research had studied creativity, few investigated what inspires it — which is, of course, curiosity.
After reading 2,000 years’ worth of Western philosophical and historical literature, Zurn identified descriptions of multiple styles of curiosity. Then, the duo devised a plan to investigate them using Wikipedia.
If you don’t know, Wikipedia is the world’s largest encyclopedia, and even set a Guinness World Record for the achievement. Anyone who spends time on the website knows how easy it is to get sucked into rabbit hole after rabbit hole of information, which also makes it an ideal place to study human curiosity.
The Study
Zurn, Bassett, and their colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania teamed up with Martin Gerlach, a research scientist at the Wikipedia Foundation, to study the network science behind the site’s infamous rabbit holes and how they relate to Zurn's research on curiosity styles. They published their findings in Science Advances on October 25, 2024.
The team tracked link trails of over 482,000 people who used Wikipedia's mobile app across 50 countries or territories and 14 languages.
The researchers traced the threads users left as they browsed various Wikipedia articles, using what they called “knowledge networks," networks of connected information that represent how closely related search topics are.
The Results
Ultimately, the team identified three specific styles of curiosity that emerged from the patterns of human inquisitiveness on the site: the “hunter,” the “busybody,” and the “dancer.”
Hunters are methodical in their searches, generally navigating between fewer articles with closely related topics. A busybody, on the other hand, is the opposite of a hunter. These searchers zigzag across many, often distantly related subjects without much tying the subjects together.
Meanwhile, dancers are somewhere between the two. Like busybodies, dancers flit between vastly different topics, but they remain focused like hunters by connecting the subjects to form new ideas. Bassett explained to Stix:
“Curiosity actually works by connecting pieces of information, not just acquiring them. It’s not as if we go through the world and pick up a piece of information and put it in our pockets like a stone. Instead we gather information and connect it to stuff that we already know.”
However, the team also found another pattern in the link trails related to topics that people in each group searched for.
For instance, the busybody group was more likely to read about geography, history, and culture-related topics, like media, food, art, philosophy, and religion. Meanwhile, hunters appear more interested in articles related to STEM (Science, Technology, Technology, and Mathematics.) The team writes in the study that,
“These tendencies are consistent with the hypothesis that busybodies gravitate more toward social topics than do hunters.”
Bonus Findings
The team also identified relationships between the three curiosity styles and education, well-being, and inequality.
For instance, people in countries with greater gender equality and higher education levels were more likely to engage with the busybody style while browsing the site. On the flip side, people living in countries with lower gender equality and education were more likely to browse as hunters. When looking at their results, the team concludes:
Together, the results are consistent with the notion that certain forms of curiosity support well-being and that policies and practices of equality may support less restricted and diverse forms of curiosity. They also raise the question of whether the social forces underlying inequality serve to constrain curiosity into hunter-like styles, thereby negatively affecting epistemic well-being.
Epistemic well-being refers to people's ability to navigate the world and achieve their goals through having access to knowledge and trustworthy information, distinguishing between truth and falsehood, and engaging in meaningful conversations that enhance their understanding.
Why?
The researchers mention several possible drivers behind the curiosity-inequality relationship, including: “gender, racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and epistemic norms as well as their intersection.”
Gender is a significant factor, however. One reason is that Wikipedia is far more popular among people who identify as men. Surveys show that while men and women visit Wikipedia for similar reasons, people who identify as women visit fewer pages per session and are underrepresented among readers. Further, the researchers point out in their study that,
“Men tend to have greater specific curiosity than diversive curiosity, where a specific curiosity involves seeking detailed information about a specific topic, whereas diversive curiosity involves seeking a broad range of new information.”
Considering the perceived gendered difference in curiosity styles, the authors suggest,
“it is possible that patriarchal forces drive a narrowing of curiosity practices — and a constraining of knowledge production approaches — that leads to hunter-like curiosity at the expense of other diverse forms of curiosity.”
Basset told Stix that,
“in countries that have more structures of oppression or patriarchal forces, there may be a constraining of knowledge production that pushes people more toward this hyperfocus.”
Furthermore, hunters were more likely to engage in STEM topics, reflecting the “specific versus diverse epistemic curiosity found to be more prevalent in men,“ while “people socialized as women are pushed away from STEM.”
Perspective Shift
Basset, Zurn, and their team’s research also reaffirms the power of balance. Humans tend to think in binary terms — hot or cold, up or down, man or woman, hate or love — but the reality is that binaries are spectrums, and often, a balance is ideal over extremes.
Basset and Zurn’s research focused mainly on the hunter and busybody curiosity styles, which are at opposite ends of the spectrum. However, they claim the dancer method is the most ideal.
According to the study, the dancer represents the most direct path from curiosity to creativity. They describe the dancer's style of curiosity as:
“a dance in which disparate concepts, typically conceived of as unrelated, are briefly linked in unique ways as the curious individual leaps and bounds across traditionally siloed areas of knowledge. Such brief linking fosters the generation or creation of new experiences, ideas, and thoughts.”
In the end, Basset and Zurn found what they wanted to know — and then some. They sought to understand the relationship between curiosity and creativity better and identified three curiosity styles, of which the dancer's method seems to align most with the process of generating new ideas and thoughts, inspiring creativity.
I was initially excited about this research because I think it’s awesome that experts are exploring our emotions. However, the team’s findings take things even further by identifying deeper relationship patterns between people’s curiosity styles and social systems. They reveal intriguing implications about how social structures influence our curiosity, for better or worse.
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Never thought of it that way. Makes sense