Curiosity shocked the human

Apparently, cats are so curious that it can kill them, but what about humans? Curiosity is arguably a major driving force for progress. Without some curious people, we would never have started to roast deceased animals on fire, never have invented the light bulb, and never developed nuclear weapons.

The last example shows that when we are curious about something, the outcome may not always be positive. But nuclear weapons, dangerous as they may be, were originally developed to help win the war against Nazi Germany and one may say that while the long-term result of developing nuclear weapons may be negative or at best cost us a lot of money to build weapons we will never use, nobody would want to suffer just to satisfy her curiosity.

The conventional wisdom about curiosity is that humans will try to satisfy their curiosity as long as they can expect to get some positive result from it. This could be as harmless as looking up the latest football results to check how your team has done or as consequential as shooting up heroin. No sane person would open Pandora’s legendary box, i.e. try to satisfy their curiosity even though they know the outcome is negative or harmful to them.

Except that most people would.

Christopher Hsee and his colleagues recruited 54 Americans to enter a lab and participate in an experiment. The volunteers were told they would be evaluating certain ‘stimuli’, but the real test happened while they waited for the lab assistant to get the ‘stimuli’ in another room. While they were waiting for several minutes, they were told by the lab assistant that they could play around with the 10 pens on the table that were ostensibly left over from a previous experiment.

In one version of the experiment the pens were marked with green and red stickers (5 each) and the lab assistant told them that the pens with a red sticker contained a battery so when they used them, they would get a painful but harmless electric shock. The pens with a green sticker, on the other hand, were harmless.

In another version of the experiment, all ten pens were marked with a yellow sticker and the lab assistant told the volunteers that some of the pens were harmless while others would give them an electric shock, but he had no clue which one’s which.

Compare the two setups and you see that in the first setup, the volunteers can choose between two sets of pens. One set has a certain negative outcome (you get an electric shock) while another set has a certain neutral outcome (you get no shock). In the second setup, on the other hand, you have an uncertain outcome that on average is going to be negative (you have a 50% chance of being shocked).

In the second setup with the uncertain outcome, you might try out a couple of pens just to see which ones are charged and which ones are not, while in the first setup, you might avoid the charged pens altogether or try out one to see how bad the shock is and then play around with the uncharged pens. What you would expect is that people would naturally gravitate toward the uncharged pens. If you are faced with an uncertain outcome, you would probably try around with a few pens until you find one that doesn’t create an electric shock and then stick with that one.

But what happened was different. In the first condition with the pens marked as red and green, people on average played around with 3-4 pens. Yes, they tried out some of the pens with a red sticker to see how bad the shock was, but once they tried one, they pretty quickly moved on to the harmless pens.

In the second setup with the uncertain outcome, the volunteers on average played around with 5-6 pens. Their curiosity made them check out more pens, even though they knew that would give them more electrical shocks and they had no benefit from getting these shocks. The desire to satisfy their curiosity to find out which pens were charged, and which ones were harmless was so powerful that people were willing to get more electric shocks just to reduce that uncertainty.

And if you ask me for an application in real life, I will point to social media and the outrage machine that is cable news. People know they are going to get mad when they tune into cable news or when they look at the Twitter feed of a prominent politician on the other end of the political spectrum. Liberals loved to read Trump’s Twitter feed (when he was still on Twitter) to check what outrageous things he had said on the day. Similarly, conservatives love to follow the Twitter feed of AOC or other liberal icons even though they know it makes them mad and there is nothing they can do about it. But the very act of reducing uncertainty and satisfying our curiosity is valuable to us. And that is what media companies have learned to exploit.