Rational Curiosity and Information-Seeking in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Curiosity is a powerful determinant of behavior. The past decade has seen a surge of scientific research on curiosity, an endeavor recently imbibed with urgency by the WHO, which set managing information-seeking as a public health goal during pandemics. And yet, a fundamental aspect of curiosity has remained unresolved: its relationship to utility. Is curiosity a drive towards information simply for the sake of obtaining that information, or is it a rational drive towards optimal learning? We leveraged people’s curiosity about COVID-19 to study information-seeking and learning in a large sample (n=5376) during the spring of 2020. Our findings reveal that curiosity is goal-rational in that it maximizes the personal utility of learning. Personal utility, unlike normative economic utility, is contingent on a person’s motivational state. On the basis of these findings, we explain information-seeking during the pandemic with a rational theoretical framework for curiosity.