Exploring the 3 Styles of Curiosity

By Kira M. Newman

Do you consider yourself a curious person? Curiosity is a strong desire to learn or know something. But according to researcher Perry Zurn, curiosity is not a singular thing. In fact, there may be at least three styles of curiosity that could have different benefits for our wellbeing and for the societies we live in.

In 2019, Zurn analyzed classical texts from the history of philosophy to study the nature of curiosity. Searching for mentions of curiosity in writings by philosophers from Saint Augustine to Friedrich Nietzsche to Jacques Derrida, he uncovered three different models of curiosity:

The busybody: The archetypal gossiper, busybodies like to pick up bits of information about a wide range of topics. They aren’t necessarily driven by a particular goal, but just by interest.

The hunter: Hunters seek out specific answers, so they follow a targeted path and try to avoid distractions.

The dancer: Dancers leap to new ideas, put existing ideas together in new ways, or find new ways of framing information. They don’t follow a traditional path.

According to Zurn, these three styles aren’t mutually exclusive; someone exhibiting curiosity might fall into more than one category.

Building on these ideas, Zurn and a group of collaborators recently sought to examine real-life curious people—readers of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia—to see if they fit into these categories, and how different styles of curiosity might influence our lives. Their results were published in the fall by the journal Science Advances.

Curiosity across cultures
For a targeted experiment, the researchers asked 149 people to come in person to fill out surveys on their mood and then browse Wikipedia for 15 minutes a day for three weeks. They also looked at the behavior of over 480,000 people from 50 countries and territories who used the Wikipedia mobile app, which collects data on the pages that people visit.

For each person, researchers constructed a map of all the pages they clicked on in a particular session, looking at how many different topics they browsed and how connected the topics were to each other. For example, did someone look up actor Adam Brody and then read more about his show Nobody Wants This, or did they jump from the Prime Minister of Canada to transcendental meditation?

First off, the researchers did find evidence that these three styles exist in modern-day internet readers. “These three curiosity styles are constitutively human — spanning languages, cultures, and millennia,” says Dani S. Bassett, a coauthor on the study.

It turns out that busybody readers are more likely to read Wikipedia articles on culture, like sports, food, or the arts, whereas hunters are more likely to read about STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Busybodies also tend to read about a more diverse range of topics.

Does curiosity style matter for the individual? When in-person participants browsed Wikipedia in tighter, more targeted ways, like hunters, they reported feeling more depressed and anxious compared to the busybodies and dancers. This aligns with other research suggesting that people with a strong drive to fill in gaps in knowledge — one part of curiosity as measured by psychologists — tend to be more anxious and cope less well with the stress of confronting new things.

Curiosity and equality
Among the global readers, in countries where people’s Wikipedia browsing is looser and more diverse — more akin to busybodies and dancers rather than hunters — people tend to feel more positive and less negative emotions, the population is better educated, and there is less gender and education inequality.

In this case, the links may go both ways: Broader curiosity might support more equality in society, but equality may also free up our wide-ranging inquisitiveness.

“Gender and education equality can support the engagement of more minds, and more different minds, in building knowledge,” says Bassett. “Moreover, it can be accompanied with great respect for a diversity of knowledges and knowledge practices. Equality can bring freedom to move, not just in the physical and social worlds, but also freedom to move in the mind.”

Of course, there may be other styles of curiosity beyond these three. For example, personality psychologists describe three other types of curious people: the Fascinated, who have many interests; the Problem-Solvers, whose curiosity is focused on a particular area; and the Empathizers, who are very socially curious.

Bassett suggests that people probably have a tendency toward a certain curiosity style, but it can change over time. “We can pick up skills for different curiosity styles from our mentors, friends, or family who may think differently than us,” they say. And that’s good news, because they stress that the three styles are probably best used in combination.

“There is an important place for all three styles of curiosity,” says Bassett.