December 24, 2024
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A Wikipedia search reveals different styles of curiosity
Are you a “hunter” or a “busy”?
The Wikipedia website describes curiosity as “a quality associated with intelligent thinking, such as exploration, research, and learning, evident in humans and other animals.” But there is much more to this basic motivation of human behavior, and Wikipedia, as the world’s largest encyclopedia, is helping social scientists today delve deeper into the definition. curiosity.
Exploring how Wikipedia searchers navigate and get lost between topics Wiki rabbit holes He revealed three distinct styles of human curiosity: the “busy,” the “hunter,” and the “dancer.”
“Curiosity works by connecting pieces of information, not just acquiring them.” —Dani Bassett, University of Pennsylvania
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In this lexicon, a busybody traces a zigzag path through many often far-flung topics. A hunter, on the other hand, searches in a persistent focus, moving through a relatively small number of closely related articles. A dancer connects very different subjects to try to synthesize new ideas. “Curiosity works by connecting pieces of information, not just acquiring them,” says University of Pennsylvania network scientist Dani Bassett, lead author of a recent study on these kinds of curiosities. in the year Science Advances. “It’s not like we can go around the world and get information and put it in our pockets like a stone. Instead, we collect information and relate it to things we already know.”
The team tracked more than 482,000 people using Wikipedia’s mobile app in 50 countries or territories and 14 languages. The researchers mapped these users’ paths using “knowledge networks” of connected information, which represent how closely a search topic (a network node) is connected to another. In addition to mapping connections, they linked curiosity styles to location-based indicators of well-being, inequality, and other measures.
In countries with higher levels of education and greater gender equality, people browsed more as busybodies. In countries with lower scores on these variables, people browsed like hunters. Bassett hypothesizes that “in countries with more oppressive or patriarchal power structures, there may be constraints on knowledge production that push people more toward this hyperfocus.” Researchers have also looked at subjects of interest, from physics to the visual arts, compared to busy hunters (graphic). The dancer models, recently confirmed, were left out.
Psychologist Erik Nook of Princeton University praised the “incredibly large” scope of the study. The authors, he says, brought together expertise from a variety of fields (topology, psychology, cognitive science, affective science, clinical science, sociology, and computational modeling) to reveal “a wealth of insights into human behavior.”
The seeds of this work were planted in 2016 when Bassett and his twin brother, Perry Zurn, a philosophy professor at American University, noticed that much academic research had examined creativity, but relatively little had gone into its precursor, curiosity. Zurn emerged from a deep dive into 2,000 years of Western historical and philosophical literature, with descriptions of various styles of curiosity, including the three explored in the last article. Wikipedia then provided a real-world test base to confirm this body hunter-dancer typology drawn from the works of great philosophers. Heidegger and Nietzsche never imagined that their work would influence Wiki rabbit hole network science.
