Older people are more curious than young people, according to UvA research
Everyone is curious in a different way. Women say they want to experience more while men want to know more. This is evident from the initial results of research conducted by UvA psychology professor Maartje Raijmakers together with the VU and Weekend of Science. “I am not so convinced that young children are much more curious.”
How curious are you? Do you want more depth, or do you prefer to have an overview? Are you more interested in yourself or in others? And how does that change with age? For the Weekend of Science, psychologists from the UvA and the Vrije University of Amsterdam (VU), in collaboration with the Nemo Science Museum, are doing a year-long study of different types of curiosity.
For the first time, they are conducting an investigation of a large group of people that is not based on self-reporting, i.e., to what extent people rate themselves as curious, but also the curious behavior itself using videos and images. The research group is larger than before: By March 19th, over 3,000 people age six to 100 years old had already taken part in the online survey “How Curious Are You?” that continues until June. We put five questions to UvA psychologist Maartje Raijmakers about the interim results.
Why is it interesting to know how curious someone is?
“If you learn from curiosity then learning is more fun and you remember it better. You can capitalize on that, not only in schools or higher education but also at a science museum like Nemo. Ideally, you continue to learn throughout your life. That’s why we’re trying to get a better handle on curiosity by getting a better picture of how people differ individually.”
What makes people curious?
“Curiosity often arises when someone experiences a gap in their knowledge and they are motivated to do something about it. It may be that you’re looking for knowledge, which we call epistemic curiosity, or you want to experience something, which we call perceptual curiosity. Those turn out to be two separate things. Another distinction in curiosity is exploration, going through all the unknown things briefly, and exploitation, when you want to explore one thing in depth.
“There are optimal conditions for curiosity. You are most motivated to do something if the knowledge gap is not too big, which makes it uninteresting, and not too small, making it boring. This is called the Goldilocks principle. The optimal conditions for curiosity create focused attention and the drive to do something.”
Doesn’t curiosity depend very much on the subject?
“That is indeed a question the literature does not answer unambiguously: How subject-specific is curiosity? If you get curious in a science museum, does that mean you will also be curious at a lecture? Opinions differ on that. At the beginning of the study, we ask what topics interest you to take that into account.”
And is curiosity a trait or a condition?
“If you look at the big five personality traits in psychology, one of them is ‘openness to new experiences,’ which correlates with curiosity. There we see a fairly strong genetic factor which would suggest that curiosity is indeed a trait. But of course, it also depends on the context, how busy you are, and how much space you have in your head, so very often it’s also a condition. I think both are present. But this study doesn’t specifically address that.”
What did you expect to get out of the research?
“To be able to distinguish multiple types of curiosity and see the differences between ages. We also want to investigate whether it is true that differences between types of curiosity only appear later in life. Infants’ viewing behavior and orientation to new information could be called curiosity, but it’s too early to speak of different types such as perceptual or epistemic curiosity. According to the differentiation hypothesis, that distinction only arises later in life. Does that hypothesis hold true for curiosity as well? We can’t say anything about that until we have collected all the data. We are still looking for more women over 50 and men under 50 and people under 25.”
Your preliminary results show that older people are actually more curious than younger people. How can that be? Surely young children are super curious?
“That’s a widely held idea, but I’m not so convinced that small children are that much more curious. People of different ages also have a big difference in knowledge. Children create a mini-theory of how the world works from all the experiences they have. That doesn’t quite add up yet so they are more likely to encounter inconsistencies with what they expect and that provokes questions. We call that curiosity, but is that true? Norms also play an important role in curiosity. On weekends at Nemo, you mainly see children indulging their curiosity, but on museum night, adults do just the same.”
What does it say about young people that older people appear to be more curious?
“I think schoolchildren, who are bombarded with knowledge all day long, live in a very different environment than adults. Older people, especially retirees, say they have more room to delve into subjects. I think that does factor in.
During the Weekend of Science on October 5th and 6th, the final results of the curiosity survey will be published. Participation in the survey can continue until June 2024.
