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.

中文翻译：

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好奇心具有传染性：引发好奇心的社会影响干预

我们的行动和决定经常受到我们周围社会环境的影响。是否可以利用社交线索来激发好奇心并影响后续行为？在两个实验中，我们表明好奇心是会传染的：社会环境会影响人们对科学问题答案的好奇心。参与者每天都会收到来自一个流行在线论坛的关于科学的日常问题，这些问题会以高或低的投票数显示，作为流行的社会线索。参与者表达了他们对答案的好奇心，他们有机会透露这些答案的一部分。当问题以高（相对于低）票数提出时，参与者对问题的答案表现出更大的好奇心，他们也更有可能选择对高（相对于低）投票数的问题透露答案。这些影响部分是由惊讶和推断出的知识有用性所介导的，与高票相比，高票在减少好奇心方面的效果更显着。综上所述，这些结果突出了社会信息在塑造我们的好奇心方面的重要作用。