Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Our actions and decisions are regularly influenced by the socialenvironment around us. Can social environment be leveragedto induce curiosity and facilitate subsequent learning? Acrosstwo experiments, we show that curiosity is contagious: socialenvironment can influence people’s curiosity about the answersto scientific questions. Our findings show that people are morelikely to become curious about the answers to more popularquestions, which in turn influences the information they chooseto reveal. Given that curiosity has been linked to better learning,these findings have important implications for education.