To stimulate people’s curiosity in a topic, explain how it benefits society

There's a simple way to boost curiosity in a topic — and if you're a teacher or lecturer, or parent who would like their kids to engage with science, it could be helpful to know it…. According to new work in Cognition, simply presenting people with interesting facts isn't enough to really drive a desire to know more. But stressing that the facts are useful — not necessarily to them personally, but to society in general — stimulates significantly more curiosity. 

Rachit Dubey and colleagues at Princeton University, US first gave 300 participants 10 scientific questions each from Reddit's Explain Like I'm Five subreddit. For each question, the participants rated their curiosity in knowing the answer and also how much they thought that the answer would benefit them personally or benefit others and society in general. The team found that participants were more curious to know the answer when they thought the topic was either personally or socially beneficial.

In a fresh study, the team manipulated the perceived social usefulness of information on the biology of fruit flies and of rats. Participants read two articles: one emphasised how work on the fly (or rat) could be highly beneficial to medicine, while the other questioned whether it would generate any medical benefits. Participants were more curious about this topic when the work was framed as having high vs low value to medicine. (No, I didn't find this surprising, either. But the team argues that it helps to build their case.)

In a final online study, participants read one of three versions of an article that presented information about fruit fly reproduction. One version highlighted this topic's usefulness to ecology while a second version referenced its usefulness to medical research. A third version just presented "interesting facts" without highlighting any particular benefits. Emphasising benefits to medicine triggered most curiosity. And the researchers report that those who read only the "interesting facts" were least curious about learning more, even if they'd found those facts surprising.

Of course, few people would find information about fruit fly reproduction interesting. So yes, emphasizing benefits may indeed be important for stoking curiosity in a relatively arcane topic. For a topic that's more appealing to a general audience, perhaps presenting the facts alone might have been enough to stimulate plenty of curiosity.

However, many academics working on curiosity argue that it is pursued for its own sake, the researchers write; perceived usefulness, for example, is not generally thought to be relevant for curiosity — and this new work challenges this idea.

So what are the practical lessons? For lecturers and teachers, highlighting, wherever possible, the potential usefulness of various topics to society, if not to students personally, might help to stoke a desire to learn more (especially if the topic is not obviously immediately interesting). The researchers make this argument for scientific facts, especially. But of course it could be true for other subjects that unfortunately some kids see as boring and irrelevant, such as history. You'd think all kids would love "doing" the Vikings, for example; mine just didn't. But if the absolute usefulness of understanding that history for understanding modern Britain had been highlighted, perhaps they'd have been keener to learn more.