When Curiosity Helps—and When It Hurts

PBS Department Seminar Series

Curiosity is a powerful motivator of learning, but it is unclear whether it can be leveraged to draw people toward information they would otherwise prefer to avoid, such as aversive information about their health. In the first part of this talk, I present a series of pre-registered experiments examining whether curiosity can be used to counter information avoidance. Across several health domains, I show that simple curiosity prompts, such as obscuring information or eliciting guesses, increase people’s willingness to engage with information they would otherwise avoid. In some cases, these interventions also improve downstream health-related choices.

The second part of the talk turns to the role of curiosity in the spread of misinformation. While curiosity can increase engagement with useful information, it is also widely exploited in click-bait headlines and misleading content online. I present ongoing experimental work testing whether inducing state curiosity before exposure to information increases trust in that information, even when it is false. This work examines how curiosity affects perceived accuracy, sharing intentions, and engagement with misleading articles. Together, these findings suggest that curiosity is a double-edged psychological force—capable of reducing information avoidance, but potentially increasing vulnerability to misinformation.

Dr Yana Litovsky is an Assistant Professor of Behavioural Science in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE. Her research examines how people value and engage with information, with a particular focus on curiosity, information avoidance, health decision-making, and misinformation. Using online experiments and crowd-based methods, she studies how well-documented judgment and decision-making biases shape information preferences and how curiosity can both promote beneficial engagement and increase vulnerability to misleading content.

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