Authors: Nayen Lee, Anika Islam, Gemma Trimble, Sarah Nesbit, Kelsey Lucca

  To successfully learn from others, children must be curious about how others think, behave, and feel (Wu & Gweon, 2021). Curiosity about people, or ¡°social curiosity¡±, is defined as the desire to learn about others (Renner, 2006) and is one of the core dimensions of early curiosity (Lee et al., 2023). Despite its importance, there have been few attempts to foster children's social curiosity. To fill this gap, we investigated the malleability of social curiosity in children by developing a novel paradigm, the ¡°Social Uncertainty Paradigm (SUP)¡±. The SUP elicits social curiosity in two key ways: (1) by creating gaps in children¡¯s knowledge about a new person, and (2) by drawing their attention to these gaps (Lowenstein, 1994).

  Children (N=89, M=78 months) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: Social Curiosity (SC), General Curiosity (curiosity about objects; GC), or No Curiosity (NC). Participants had chances to learn about a new person, Sam (target of SC) and a new object, the Apple House (target of GC). Children in the SC group gained only minimal information about Sam, but abundant information about the Apple House (vice versa for the GC group, who learned more about Sam than the Apple House). Children in the NC group obtained an equal amount of information about both.

  After the learning trials, children completed four curiosity measures. In a Choice Task, they chose to learn about either Sam or the Apple House and justified their choice, later classified into six categories. In a Rating Task, children rated how much they wanted to learn about each topic on a 5-point scale. Next, children completed two Extension Tasks, in which they were asked to select to learn about and rate another new person (Erin) and a new object (Strawberry House). The extension tasks tested whether elicited social curiosity is target-specific or generalizes to any target within the social realm.

  We found that the probability of choosing Sam was significantly higher in the SC group (odds ratio (OR)=3.67) than in the GC (OR=0.19, p=.001) and NC groups (OR=0.76, p=.001). 78% of children who chose Sam in the SC group explained that their choice was primarily driven by their desire to address knowledge gaps. Relatedly, the mean curiosity rating for Sam was significantly higher in the SC group (M=4.29, SD=1.21) than in the GC (M=1.90, SD=1.45, p=.001) and NC groups (M=3.23, SD=1.68, p =.001). For the extension tasks, children were marginally more likely to choose Erin in the SC compared to the GC group (p = .056) and the mean curiosity rating for Erin was significantly higher in the SC (M=3.78, SD= 1.34) than in the GC group (M=2.74, SD=1.81, p =.005). No other comparisons were significant across the two Extension Tasks (ps>.05).

  These new findings show that social curiosity in childhood is malleable, and identify critical mechanisms of social curiosity – i.e. the creation and perception of social knowledge gaps. Further, we found the first evidence that social curiosity about a new person may extend to other individuals, within limits. In our talk, we will also present data exploring sources of individual differences in children¡¯s responsivity to the SUP (e.g., whether trait-level social curiosity predicts children¡¯s social curiosity elicited by the SUP) and a follow-up study testing whether increases in social curiosity boost children¡¯s prosociality.