Dr Yana Litovsky awarded LSE impact prize funding for curiosity research

Dr Yana Litovsky was Runner Up at the 2026 LSE Impact Prize in the Spark Award for Innovation category for her project Curiosity interventions to counter information avoidance.

LSE's annual Impact Prize recognises excellent engagement, impact, and impact culture across the School. The Spark Award recognises and supports the development of new products, services, methodologies or processes with the potential to benefit society.

Dr Litovsky said of her project: "People often avoid valuable health information, like cancer risk results or blood glucose alerts, even though it could help them make better decisions. My laboratory research shows that sparking curiosity via simple prompts is a scalable way to overcome this avoidance to increase the uptake of health information and even shift real choices, such as opting for sugar-free drinks. This funding will support a field study to test whether these effects hold in real-world platforms where users might disengage from information that could improve their health. If successful, it would give health platforms a cheap, easy-to-deploy tool to boost engagement and could offer a model for tackling information avoidance beyond health, in areas like finance and the environment."