Choice boosts curiosity

In our connected era, we spend significant time and effort pursuing our curiosity. Often, we choose which information we seek, but on occasion, the selection is made for us. Hence, understanding whether and how choice influences curiosity is a key question. Prior evidence indicates that humans exhibit a preference for options they have freely chosen over equally valued options that they have not. Based on these findings, we hypothesized that we also exhibit enhanced curiosity in the context of choice compared with that of no-choice. To test this hypothesis, we designed a task in which participants saw two lotteries on each trial. On some trials, participants chose which lottery would be played. On other trials, the lottery was selected for them. Participants then indicated their curiosity about the outcome of the lottery that would be played in terms of self-report ratings (Experiment 1) or willingness to wait decisions (Experiment 2). As predicted, we found that participants exhibited higher curiosity ratings and higher willingness to wait for the outcome of lotteries they had chosen than for lotteries that had been selected for them (controlling for initial preference). These findings demonstrate that choice boosts curiosity, which may have implications for how to boost learning, memory, and motivation, for example in educational settings.