Wikipedia Searches Reveal Differing Styles of Curiosity

The website Wikipedia describes curiosity as a “quality related to inquisitive thinking, such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident in humans and other animals.” But there is a lot more to this prime motivator for so much of human behavior—and Wikipedia, as the world’s largest encyclopedia, is now helping social scientists deepen the definition of curiosity.

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Princeton University psychologist Erik Nook praised the study’s “dazzlingly large” scope. The authors, he says, brought together expertise from a range of fields—topology, psychology, cognitive science, affective science, clinical science, sociology and computational modeling—to reveal a “host of insights into human behavior.”

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