Department of Computer Science, Princeton University.
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley.
Cogn Sci. 2021 Feb;45(2):e12937. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12937.
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 they were also more likely to choose to reveal the answers to questions with a high (vs. low) number of up-votes. These effects were partially mediated by surprise and by the inferred usefulness of knowledge, with a more dramatic effect of low up-votes in reducing curiosity than of high up-votes in boosting curiosity. Taken together, these results highlight the important role social information plays in shaping our curiosity.
我们的行为和决策经常受到周围社会环境的影响。社会线索能否被利用来激发好奇心并影响后续行为？在两项实验中，我们表明好奇心是会传染的：社会环境可以影响人们对科学问题答案的好奇心。参与者被呈现了来自一个流行在线论坛的日常科学问题，这些问题伴随着高或低的点赞数作为受欢迎程度的社会线索。参与者表示了他们对答案的好奇心，并且有机会揭示其中一部分答案。当问题伴随着高（低）点赞数时，参与者报告说对答案的好奇心更大，并且他们也更有可能选择揭示高（低）点赞数的问题的答案。这些影响部分由惊讶和推断出的知识有用性所介导，低点赞数对降低好奇心的影响比高点赞数对提高好奇心的影响更为显著。总之，这些结果突出了社会信息在塑造我们的好奇心方面所起的重要作用。
