Poster #102 - Malleability of Social Curiosity and its Impact on Prosocial Development

• In Event: Poster Session 18

Abstract

Curiosity is a powerful driving force of exploration and learning in children (Jirout & Klahr, 2012). While past work has shown that environmental factors can support or squelch children’s general curiosity (Schutte & Malouff, 2022), whether specific types of curiosity can be primed remains open. Social curiosity, a general interest in acquiring new information about how other people behave, think, and feel (Renner, 2006), may play an important role in helping children navigate the complex social world. However, little is known about whether and how we can elicit children’s social curiosity and how this increased social curiosity benefits children’s social development. Here, we fill these gaps by examining the malleability of social curiosity by adapting the “uncertainty priming paradigm” that has been successfully used to elicit general curiosity in children (Gibson, 2014, Exp 1) and testing impacts on prosocial behavior (Exp 2).
Children aged 5 to 8 will participate in Experiment 1 (target N =132; sufficient to detect a small to medium effect size with 80% power) in our “Living Lab” at the Children’s Museum. Children will be randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In the Social Curiosity condition, children will watch a movie clip in which a main character interacts with another character. To elicit social curiosity, the movie clip will end right before the main character reveals important social information. In the Social Information condition, children will watch the same movie clip, but with the complete ending so that uncertainty will be resolved (Figure 1). To maximize the priming effect (Sher et al., 2019) in the Social Curiosity condition, the experimenter will remark about the main character’s upcoming behaviors at the end of the clip (e.g., “Wow! I wonder what she is going to say next!”). In the Social Information condition, the experimenter will comment on the movie clip in general (e.g., “Wow! The movie is so fun!”).
Next, children will be asked whether they want to learn about the main character or a focal object from the movie clip. Depending on their choice, children will listen to either audio clips delivering information about the main character or the focal object, with an instruction to push a stop button when they want to stop the audio clip and move onto playing another game. (Figure 2). We hypothesize that children in the Social Curiosity condition will choose the main character and spend more time learning about the main character over the focal object. We will run two regressions to test our hypotheses (IV = experiment condition; DV1 = preference for learning object, DV2 = time spent listening).
This study will contribute to the growing body of literature combatting the notion that curiosity is a fixed trait, and extend this work into an understudied, but crucial domain – social curiosity. If we are successful in our attempts to boost social curiosity, we will extend our research to test how elicited social curiosity is linked to benefits in children's social development, such as increased prosocial behaviors (Experiment 2, target N = 132 for 2023 presentation).

Authors

• Nayen Lee, Arizona State University
  Presenting Author

• Anika Islam, Arizona State University

• Kelsey Lucca, Arizona State University