Dr Yana Litovsky
Dr Yana Litovsky is Assistant Professor of Behavioural Science at LSE.
You’re nearing the end of your first academic year at LSE. How have you found it so far, and what have been the highlights of joining LSE and the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science (PBS)?
The move to London from the Alps was a big change but I love my new home. That’s true geographically, but even truer professionally. I feel like PBS is a perfect fit for me, even if I’m still learning the ropes, including what all the seemingly endless acronyms mean. One of the biggest highlights has been getting to know the faculty, staff and students. It’s a thrill to be surrounded by such brilliant and interesting people: colleagues who care deeply about their work, but who make time for a chat, a laugh, or a practical tip on surviving London with two small children. Between the lovely coffees and lunches, informal conversations and budding collaborations, everyone has been incredibly welcoming. It almost goes without saying, but the other major highlight has been the exposure to so much fantastic research. All in all, PBS is a wonderfully stimulating and collegial place to work.
What is your area of expertise, and what first drew you to it?
My area of expertise is in how people value and make decisions about information and knowledge. What first drew me to this topic was trying to understand our relationship to information in a world where the amount we can access and consume vastly exceeds what we can process and retain. I’m especially fascinated by what draws us to learn in the first place. What makes some information feel worth pursuing, even when we are unlikely to use it, and may almost certainly forget it? And to what extent does knowledge feel like a precious possession, rather than just a tool for making better decisions? In some of my work, I try to understand the power and consequences of curiosity: how it can be used for good, by attracting people to useful and important information, but can also mislead us, by lowering our vigilance and making us more vulnerable to misinformation.
What do you see as some of the biggest unanswered questions in your field?
One answered question I keep coming back to is how we value information when we receive it at such enormous scale, and when we know we will retain so little of it. What makes something feel worth knowing if we are likely to forget it almost immediately? I’m interested in whether information has become, in some ways, a transient experience: something we consume, react to, and move on from, rather than something we hold onto, build on, or use. Another emerging question is how AI will change our relationship to information, and our curiosity for it. What happens to the desire to learn when it is met with personalised, immediately available, incredibly fluent information, and when even the follow-up questions are spoon-fed by AI chatbots rather than internally generated?
What projects are you working on at the moment?
At the moment, I’m working on a project to understand how the experience of curiosity affects our ability to detect misinformation, a question that feels particularly relevant since so much misinformation is packaged in curiosity-inducing formats. I’m also developing research on how features of AI may shape curiosity-based information search. I’ve recently completed work with colleagues at Innsbruck on the impact of AI labelling on misinformation detection. I’m also collaborating with colleagues here in PBS on work about the perceived role of curiosity in society, and on a project exploring broad motivations for information avoidance. And I have a few other related projects patiently waiting on the back burner.
Has your research had to adapt in response to technological, social or geopolitical change? If so, how?
Very much so. In some ways, my research did not so much adapt to technological change as emerge from it. I became interested in curiosity and information-seeking in a world where information had become abundant, constantly available, and increasingly difficult to process, evaluate, or retain. That technological reality has shaped almost everything I work on: why people seek information, why they avoid it, how misinformation exploits curiosity, and how AI may change the way people ask questions and pursue knowledge. The tools and platforms keep changing, but the underlying question remains the same: how do human motives for learning operate in an environment where information is no longer scarce?
What kind of impact do you hope your research will have?
Aside from satisfying my own curiosity, I hope my research can help us better understand, and perhaps gain more agency over, our information choices. I’d like to find ways to direct curiosity toward information that helps us, or truly satisfies us, while counteracting some of the forces that distort our relationship to information: anxiety-driven avoidance on one side, and addictive overconsumption on the other.
Teaching is often where research comes to life. What topic do you most enjoy teaching, and why?
I like most aspects of teaching. I enjoy teaching topics I feel expert in because it gives me the pleasure of thinking about, and sharing, ideas that are already central to my research. That is why I’m especially looking forward to teaching a class on the behavioural science of information that I’m developing for next year. It is directly related to my own work, so it will give me a chance to think through the questions that genuinely preoccupy me with students who may inspire me with their questions as much as my answers will (hopefully!) inspire them. But I also really enjoy teaching the fundamentals of the field, such as research methods or the design of behavioural interventions and find it very rewarding to introduce students to these key skills or principles for the first time.