A recent study using Wikipedia data has identified three distinct curiosity styles: busybodies, hunters, and dancers. Busybodies explore a wide range of unrelated topics, hunters focus on a few closely related areas, and dancers synthesize information from disparate sources. This research suggests that curiosity manifests differently across cultures, with higher education and gender equality correlating with more explorative browsing patterns.
The website Wikipedia describes curiosity as a “quality related to inquisitive thinking, such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident in humans and other animals.” But there is a lot more to this prime motivator for so much of human behavior—and Wikipedia , as the world’s largest encyclopedia, is now helping social scientists deepen the definition of.
In this lexicon, a busybody traces a zigzagging route through many often distantly related topics. A hunter, in contrast, searches with sustained focus, moving among a relatively small number of closely related articles. A dancer links together highly disparate topics to try to synthesize new ideas.
The team tracked more than 482,000 people using Wikipedia’s mobile app in 50 countries or territories and 14 languages. The researchers charted these users’ paths using “knowledge networks” of connected information, which depict how closely one search topic is related to another. Beyond just mapping the connections, they linked curiosity styles to location-based indicators of well-being, inequality, and other measures.
In countries with higher education levels and greater gender equality, people browsed more like busybodies. In countries with lower scores on these variables, people browsed like hunters. Bassett hypothesizes 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.
The seeds of this work were planted in 2016 when Bassett and their twin brother, Perry Zurn, a professor of philosophy at American University, noticed that plenty of academic research had examined creativity—but relatively little had gone to its requisite precursor, curiosity. Zurn emerged from a deep dive into 2,000 years of Western historical and philosophical literature with descriptions of various curiosity styles, including the three investigated in the recent paper.
Curiosity Wikipedia Social Science Knowledge Networks Cultural Differences
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