Researchers measure different types of curiosity studying ‘hunters and busybodies’
Curiosity has been found to play a role in our learning and emotional well-being, but due to the open-ended nature of how curiosity is actually practiced, measuring it is challenging. Psychological studies have attempted to gauge participants’ curiosity through their engagement in specific activities, however, such methods focus on quantifying a person’s curiosity rather than understanding the different ways it can be expressed.
Curiosity styles as knowledge networks where each node is a Wikipedia page and the paths between nodes represent the similarity between pages. “The hunter” style is characterized by high clustering and low overall path length, while “the busybody” style is characterized by low clustering and high overall path length. (Image: Melissa Pappas)