At one time or another, you may have gone online searching for specific information and found yourself “going down the Wiki rabbit hole” while discovering entirely new and increasingly fascinating related topics (some trivial, some relevant). and you may have gotten so far into the hole that it’s hard to piece together what brought you there to begin with.
According to Dani Bassett of the University of Pennsylvania, who recently worked with a collaborative team of researchers to examine the browsing habits of 482,760 Wikipedia readers from 50 different countries, this style of information acquisition is called “nosy.” This is someone moving from one idea or information to another, and the two pieces may not relate much to each other.
“The meddler loves any kind of novelty, he is happy to jump around, seemingly without rhyme or reason, and this contrasts with the ‘hunter’, who is a more focused and goal-oriented person looking to solve a problem, find a missing factor or complete a model of the world,” says Bassett.
In the research, published in the journal scientific advances, Bassett and her colleagues discovered stark differences in browsing habits between countries with more education and gender equality versus less equality, raising key questions about the impact of culture on curiosity and learning.
“We observed that countries that had greater inequality, in terms of gender and access to education, had people who browsed more intentionally, seeking closely related information, while people in countries that had more equality browsed expansively, with more diversity in topics, jumping from one topic to another and collecting loosely connected information,” says Bassett. “Although we do not know exactly because “I mean, we have our hunches and we think these findings will prove useful in helping scientists in our field better understand the nature of curiosity.”
This work builds on a previous study led by Annenberg School of Communication assistant professor David Lydon-Staley, who at the time was a postdoctoral researcher in the Bassett Complex Systems Laboratory.
In that article, the team had 149 participants from Philadelphia browse Wikipedia for 15 minutes a day for 21 days. In the course of that study, they identified the two styles of curiosity, which were predicted by Perry Zurn, one of the co-authors of the new paper and a professor of philosophy at American University and currently a visiting professor at Cornell University, who studied and analyzed the literature of the last two millennia to house these styles of curiosity.
“Starting this line of work with a small sample allowed us to develop the methods necessary to capture the complex information seeking that accompanies curiosity,” says Lydon-Staley. “Developing those methods allowed us to scale up and ask if we could confirm that the styles we observed could be found outside of our sample of Philadelphians.”
Working with Martin Gerlach of the Wikimedia Foundation, who had data from more than two million human browsers, “allowed us to apply our existing methods and develop new methods to capture curiosity styles emerging in 14 different Wikipedia languages and 50 different countries. or territories,” says Lydon-Staley.
The three hunches
The researchers cite three main hypotheses that drive the associations between information seeking approaches and equality.
“One is that countries that have more inequality may also have more patriarchal structures of oppression that are limiting approaches to knowledge production to be more Hunter-like,” Bassett says. “Countries that have greater equality, on the other hand, are open to a diversity of ideas and, therefore, a diversity of ways in which we engage in the world. This is more like the busybody, the one who moves between ideas in a very open-minded way.”
A second possibility the researchers describe is that browsers access Wikipedia for different purposes in different countries, citing how someone in a country with greater equality may be accessing the site for entertainment or leisure rather than work.
And the third possible explanation is that people from different countries who visit Wikipedia may be of different ages, genders, socioeconomic levels, or educational levels, and that those differences in who actually visit Wikipedia may explain differences in browsing patterns.
Making connections
One of the most interesting findings of the study was the confirmation of a third style of curiosity: the “dancer,” which had previously only been hypothesized based on Zurn’s research on historical texts.
“The dancer is someone who moves along a track of information but, unlike the busybody, jumps between ideas in a creative, choreographed way,” Zurn says. “They don’t jump around randomly; they connect different domains to create something new.”
This style of curiosity displays a certain degree of creativity and interdisciplinary thinking, offering a new perspective on how people interact with information. “It’s less about randomness and more about seeing connections where others might not,” Bassett says.
“What this tells us is that people, and probably children, have different styles of curiosity, and that could affect how they approach learning,” Bassett says. “A child with a hunter’s curiosity may have difficulty if assessed using methods that favor the intrusive style, or vice versa. Understanding these styles could help us adapt educational experiences to better support individual learning paths.”
Where Curiosity Can Lead Next
Looking ahead, the team seeks to explore the factors that influence these curiosity styles.
“A question I’m particularly interested in is whether people navigate differently at different times of the day; perhaps they’re more hunters in the morning and more nosy at night,” Bassett says.
“This opens new avenues of research, including the role of biological processes in shaping the way we search for information,” says Shubhankar Patankar, another author of the paper and a doctoral student at Penn Engineering. He is also interested in understanding the implications of the work for AI. “Imparting notions of curiosity to AI systems that learn from interactions is an increasingly important area of research,” Patankar says.
The team aims to explore the motivations behind browsing Wikipedia, examining whether users are motivated by extrinsic factors, such as work, or intrinsic curiosity, such as personal interest. Additionally, they are considering expanding their analysis to include other digital platforms where learning and exploration occur naturally.
“Wikipedia is a very special place on the Internet,” says Lydon-Staley. “The site presents content exclusively free and without commercial advertising. Much of the rest of the contemporary digital landscape is designed to activate the purchasing impulses of individuals and personalize our multimedia content. This raises the question of to what extent are we in charge of where “There is our curiosity. It takes us to online contexts beyond Wikipedia.”
Dani S. Bassett is the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with a senior appointment in the Department of Bioengineering in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences and secondary appointments in the School of Arts and Sciences‘Department of Physics and Astronomy, Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at Penn Engineering, and the Perelman School of MedicineDepartments of Neurology and Psychiatry.
Martin Gerlach is a senior research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation.
David Lydon-Staley is an assistant professor of communication and principal investigator of the Addiction, Health and Adolescence Laboratory at the Annenberg School of Communication at Penn.
Shubhankar Patankar is a Ph.D. student at Penn Engineering.
Dale Zhou was a Ph.D. student at the Perelman School of Medicine who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Irvine.
Perry Zurn is an associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in philosophy at American University in the Department of Philosophy and Religion in the College of Arts and Sciences.
This research was supported by the George E. Hewitt Foundation for Medical Research, the Curiosity Centerand the National Institute of Health (Grant K01 DA047417).