Wikipedia Searches Reveal Differing Types of Curiosity

Wikipedia Searches Reveal Differing Types of Curiosity

By Gary Stix edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier

The web site Wikipedia describes curiosity as a “quality related to inquisitive thinking, such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident in humans and other animals.” However there may be much more to this prime motivator for a lot of human conduct—and Wikipedia, because the world’s largest encyclopedia, is now serving to social scientists deepen the definition of curiosity.

Tracing how Wikipedia searchers flit amongst subjects and lose themselves in Wiki rabbit holes revealed three totally different kinds of human inquisitiveness: the “busybody,” the “hunter” and the “dancer.”

“Curiosity actually works by connecting pieces of information, not just acquiring them.” —Dani Bassett, College of Pennsylvania

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On this lexicon, a busybody traces a zigzagging route by means of many usually distantly associated subjects. A hunter, in distinction, searches with sustained focus, transferring amongst a comparatively small variety of intently associated articles. A dancer hyperlinks collectively extremely disparate subjects to attempt to synthesize new concepts. “Curiosity actually works by connecting pieces of information, not just acquiring them,” says College of Pennsylvania community scientist Dani Bassett, co­senior creator on a current research of those curiosity varieties in Science Advances. “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.”

The group tracked greater than 482,000 individuals utilizing Wikipedia’s cell app in 50 nations or territories and 14 languages. The researchers charted these customers’ paths utilizing “knowledge networks” of related info, which depict how intently one search subject (a node within the community) is said to a different. Past simply mapping the connections, they linked curiosity kinds to location-based indicators of well-­being, inequality, and different measures.

In nations with larger schooling ranges and higher gender equality, individuals browsed extra like busybodies. In nations with decrease scores on these variables, individuals 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 researchers additionally analyzed subjects of curiosity, starting from physics to visible arts, for busybodies in contrast with hunters (graphic). Dancer patterns, extra lately confirmed, had been excluded.

Princeton College psychologist Erik Nook praised the research’s “dazzlingly large” scope. The authors, he says, introduced collectively experience from a spread of fields—topology, psychology, cognitive science, affective science, medical science, sociology and computational modeling—to disclose a “host of insights into human behavior.”

The seeds of this work had been planted in 2016 when Bassett and their twin brother, Perry Zurn, a professor of philosophy at American College, seen that loads of educational analysis had examined creativity—however comparatively little had gone to its requisite precursor, curiosity. Zurn emerged from a deep dive into 2,000 years of Western historic and philosophical literature with descriptions of assorted curiosity kinds, together with the three investigated within the current paper. Wikipedia then offered the real-world check mattress to verify this busybody-hunter-dancer typology, drawn from the work of philosophical greats. Heidegger and Nietzsche may by no means have imagined that their work would sooner or later affect the community science of Wiki rabbit holes.