Wikipedia Searches Reveal Differing Types of Curiosity

Wikipedia Searches Reveal Differing Types of Curiosity

By Gary Stix edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier

The web site Wikipedia describes curiosity as a “high quality associated to inquisitive pondering, reminiscent of exploration, investigation, and studying, evident in people and different animals.” However there may be much more to this prime motivator for a lot of human conduct—and Wikipedia, because the world’s largest encyclopedia, is now serving to social scientists deepen the definition of curiosity.

Tracing how Wikipedia searchers flit amongst subjects and lose themselves in Wiki rabbit holes revealed three totally different types of human inquisitiveness: the “busybody,” the “hunter” and the “dancer.”

“Curiosity truly works by connecting items of data, not simply buying them.” —Dani Bassett, College of Pennsylvania

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On this lexicon, a busybody traces a zigzagging route by way of many usually distantly associated subjects. A hunter, in distinction, searches with sustained focus, shifting amongst a comparatively small variety of intently associated articles. A dancer hyperlinks collectively extremely disparate subjects to attempt to synthesize new concepts. “Curiosity truly works by connecting items of data, not simply buying them,” says College of Pennsylvania community scientist Dani Bassett, co­senior creator on a latest research of those curiosity varieties in Science Advances. “It’s not as if we undergo the world and choose up a bit of data and put it in our pockets like a stone. As an alternative we collect data and join it to stuff that we already know.”

The crew tracked greater than 482,000 folks utilizing Wikipedia’s cell app in 50 international locations or territories and 14 languages. The researchers charted these customers’ paths utilizing “information networks” of related data, which depict how intently one search subject (a node within the community) is said to a different. Past simply mapping the connections, they linked curiosity types to location-based indicators of well-­being, inequality, and different measures.

In international locations with greater schooling ranges and better gender equality, folks browsed extra like busybodies. In international locations with decrease scores on these variables, folks browsed like hunters. Bassett hypothesizes that “in international locations which have extra buildings of oppression or patriarchal forces, there could also be a constraining of information manufacturing that pushes folks extra towards this hyperfocus.” The researchers additionally analyzed subjects of curiosity, starting from physics to visible arts, for busybodies in contrast with hunters (graphic). Dancer patterns, extra just lately confirmed, had been excluded.

Princeton College psychologist Erik Nook praised the research’s “dazzlingly massive” scope. The authors, he says, introduced collectively experience from a variety of fields—topology, psychology, cognitive science, affective science, medical science, sociology and computational modeling—to disclose a “host of insights into human conduct.”

The seeds of this work had been planted in 2016 when Bassett and their twin brother, Perry Zurn, a professor of philosophy at American College, seen that loads of tutorial analysis had examined creativity—however comparatively little had gone to its requisite precursor, curiosity. Zurn emerged from a deep dive into 2,000 years of Western historic and philosophical literature with descriptions of assorted curiosity types, together with the three investigated within the latest paper. Wikipedia then offered the real-world take a look at mattress to substantiate this busybody-hunter-dancer typology, drawn from the work of philosophical greats. Heidegger and Nietzsche may by no means have imagined that their work would someday affect the community science of Wiki rabbit holes.