The 5 types of curiosity and their characteristics

What are the types of curiosity from which the motivation to learn and experiment arises?

Humans are very curious beings. We want to know about everything and about any situation, person or object, and therefore we do not stop collecting all kinds of knowledge that is presented around us.

However, just as there are people of all types, there are also different types of curiosity. These can depend on both the objective and the context in which the person is.

Let's take a closer look at how many different types of curiosity there are.why it is a concept a little difficult to delimit and some proposals that have been made.

How to classify the forms that curiosity takes?

The human being is a curious animal by nature. All people, to a greater or lesser extent, like to discover new things.. It is true that some people are more favorable to discovering things that are out of their routine than others, since this in itself is a personality trait within the dimension of openness to experience. But regardless of how open to experience we are, the fact is that we cannot help but be curious at some point in our lives.

If we were to make a list of types of curiosity we would surely come up with many types, each depending on factors such as context, motivation, personality traits of the person exhibiting it, and a long list of other aspects. For example, we could talk about joyful curiosity, need curiosity, stress curiosity, experiential curiosity, social curiosity, and other categories, many of them based more on general culture than on scientifically based research.

Thus, in a very general sense, we could say that there are as many types of curiosity as there are contexts and people. However, many psychologists have sought to establish a taxonomy of curiosity, many psychologists have wanted to establish a taxonomy of curiosity, a classificatory system for the types that are believed to exist.a classificatory system for the types that are believed to exist, something that we will see in detail a few paragraphs below. At the moment it is agreed that, strictly speaking, there would be 5 types of curiosity and these would relate to two interesting styles or patterns of curious behavior.

The 5 types of curiosity: a classification

Todd B. Kashdan, from George Mason University, along with his collaborators carried out in 2017 a study that has helped him to create a taxonomy of the types of curiosity. These types would be the following 5:

1. Joyful exploration

Joyful exploration coincides with the classic and popular culture's own idea that it is curiosity. It would be the one that is manifested when we are looking for something related to new knowledge or information motivated by joy, by the desire to learn something that we did not know.. It would be the curiosity we show when we want to know what a new brand of yogurt tastes like, who built a building or what is the mating pattern of sea lions.

2. Sensitivity to lack

Lack sensitivity is a type of curiosity a type of curiosity whose emotional stimulus is of a negative type, such as tension or anxiety..

It is the anxiety we feel when we want to know how a historical event that is included in the history exam was developed, how to solve a mathematical problem for which we are going to be evaluated or want to know what will happen in the next episode of our favorite soap opera after learning that one of the characters has been unfaithful to the protagonist.

3. Stress tolerance

Stress tolerance is activated when doubt or anxiety is accepted in the face of new events that are complex and mysterious..

This type of curiosity, in one way or another, helps to reduce resistance to changes that may occur when we receive new information. It is the type of curiosity that motivates us to wonder what may lie beyond fear, such as when there is a change in our country's government or a change in company policy.

4. Social curiosity

Social curiosity would be that which involves wanting to know what other people think and do by observing, talking, or gossiping.. This curiosity is synonymous with the desire to know the lives of others through various media, such as social networks, Heart programs, news programs, newspapers...

5. Search for emotions

The search for emotions is the one that leads us to seek new experiences at the cost of taking physical, social and financial risks.. An example of this type of curiosity would be what we feel when we want to explore risky sports, travel to an exotic country, try drugs or invest in the stock market.

• You may be interested in, "What is Emotional Intelligence?"

Hunters and busybodies

As we have just seen, Kashdan proposed a taxonomy of five types of curiosity, which would manifest themselves in different contexts. However, other studies have tried to see to what extent curiosity is related to our mood and what role it plays with our emotional well-being. Given that curiosity has a nature with such unclear limits, trying to measure it objectively has been a real challenge.

One of the most recurrent methods for measuring curiosity has been to see to what extent participants felt "engaged" with a series of activities, how many questions and in what ways they gossiped with the researcher about the topic or purpose of the task they were asked to do. they had been asked to do.

However, this methodology has several problems, among them that it only serves to measure the curiosity explicitly shown by the participant and does not serve to make typologies of it. In addition, it should be taken into account that the extraversion dimension can lead to the belief that a curious person, simply because he or she is introverted and not very assertive, is less interested in the activity proposed to him or her.

Taking all this into account and knowing how complicated it is to clearly define types of curiosity, the group of David M. Lydon-Staley went into the field of philosophy to study two styles of curious behavior and see how they manifest different curious behaviors: hunters and busybodies.

His method for looking at these two styles of curious behavior is quite innovative. Their experiment consisted of using WikipediaWikipedia, the largest free encyclopedia on the Internet, which, among its many advantages, has no ads and its pages allow you to jump to other pages by clicking on words highlighted in blue. In addition, the page has the classic browser of pages organized in articles, which allows you to search for a topic very easily.

The study was conducted with a sample of 149 participants who were asked to freely browse Wikipedia during the 15 minutes that each daily session lasted for a period of 21 days, adding up to a total of 5 hours that each of the subjects spent browsing this online encyclopedia. To study their behavior, the researchers used a branch of mathematics called graph theory.

Graph theory is a method the researchers used to see where their participants were browsing.. Without going into details about this complex theory, what we can highlight is that through it the researchers were able to see if the participants were looking for Wikipedia articles that were thematically related or if they were jumping from topic to topic, showing curiosity, interest in things they were reading, but in different ways.

It was thanks to this study that they were able to conceptualize a new dimension of curious behavior, in which one extreme corresponds to hunters and the other to busybodies. The hunter style is characterized by seeking information closely related to a topic, going deeper into that same topic and not going too far into the subject matter.. On the other hand, the busybody style is one in which you jump from topic to topic, collecting a wide variety of information without going too deeply into it.

By using Wikipedia and leaving the participants free to satisfy their curiosity, the researchers were able to overcome the limitation of extraversion since, thanks to this method, both introverts and extraverts had the same opportunities to be curious. Regardless of how assertive they were, participants clicked links and used the browser completely freely, without feeling self-conscious about doing so.

Styles of curiosity

The curiosity styles just discussed and the 5 types of curiosity above are related. It is worth noting that the curiosity styles, shown in the form of browsing patterns within Wikipedia, are not fixed styles, i.e., a person is not just a hunter or just nosy, but can change the style of curious behavior depending on how they feel and what type of curiosity they manifest. In other words, the hunter-nerd dimension is a highly variable continuum, which depends more on the context than on one's own personality.

In the same study, the researchers administered a questionnaire prior to each encyclopedia browsing session with the intent of understand what factors influence the emergence of one style of curiosity or another.. Among these indicators were curiosity of the lack-sensitivity and thrill-seeking type. As we have discussed, the former would be a curiosity to fill in knowledge gaps that are felt to be stressful, while the latter would be related to feeling new sensations, feeling exciting experiences.

These same researchers saw, when measuring sensation seeking before doing the Wikipedia browsing session, that people tended to take longer steps, i.e., jump from topic to topic when this type of dimension was high. The same was true if participants indicated lower sensitivity to lack, not feeling the need to go too deeply into what they read, traits of a prying style.

Viewed in this light, have hypothesized that the type of curiosity of the moment influences the style of curious behavior that is manifested.. If one has to study for an exam or delve into a certain topic on which we are going to be evaluated, sensitivity to absence is present and a hunter type style is applied. On the other hand, if one is reading or researching for pleasure, wanting to discover something new, a prying type style is applied, showing that we can be one and the other depending on our objective.

Bibliographical references:

• David M. Lydon-Staley et al. (2020). Hunters, busybodies and the knowledge network building associated with deprivation curiosity, Nature Human Behaviour DOI: 10.1038/s41562-020-00985-7
• Kashdan, Todd & Stiksma, Mel & Disabato, David & Mcknight, Patrick & Bekier, John & Kaji, Joel & Lazarus, Rachel. (2017). The Five-Dimensional Curiosity Scale: Capturing the bandwidth of curiosity and identifying four unique subgroups of curious people. Journal of Research in Personality. 73. 10.1016/j.jrp.2017.11.011.