Curiosity makes us choose potentially painful outcomes

Washington D.C : Curiosity may have made us the most successful species, but it has also killed some cats, suggests a new study.

The study showed that our curiosity is sometimes so powerful that it leads us to choose potentially painful and unpleasant outcomes that have no apparent benefits, even when we have the ability to avoid these outcomes altogether.

Rtudy author Bowen Ruan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison explained that just as curiosity drove Pandora to open the box, despite being warned of its pernicious contents, curiosity can lure humans to seek information with predictably ominous consequences.

Ruan and co-author Christopher Hsee at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business hypothesized that this curiosity stems from humans' deep-seated desire to resolve uncertainty regardless of the harm it may bring.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers designed a series of experiments that exposed participants to a variety of particularly unpleasant outcomes.

Together, the findings from this series of simple experiments make a big point: While curiosity is often seen as a human blessing, it can also be a human curse. Many times, we seek out information to satisfy our curiosity without considering what will happen when we do.

"Curious people do not always perform consequentialist cost-benefit analyses and may be tempted to seek the missing information even when the outcome is expectedly harmful," Ruan and Hsee write in their paper.

"We hope this research draws attention to the risk of information seeking in our epoch, the epoch of information," Ruan concludes.

The study appears in journal Psychological Science.