The Psychology of Curiosity

Loewenstein, G. (1994). The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 75-98.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1994

DOI

10.1037/0033-2909.116.1.75

Link

https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.116.1.75

Cited from

music_musicology, psychology

Cited by

3 citations across 3 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Curiosity
  • Curiosity emerges when the gap occupies the Goldilocks zone — neither trivially small (already known) nor overwhelmingly large (inaccessible) — producing
• Tension And Release
  • Tension-and-release to advertising: the curiosity-gap headline followed by the answer is a direct tension-release cycle, and the difference between clickbait (release too cheap relative to tension) and good content marketing (release earned by tension) is precisely the causal-coupling argument.

Mechanisms

• Provocative Question Prompt
  • Its strength is economy: one sentence can turn an explanation that was landing flat into the answer to a question the audience now actively wants — this is the information-gap account of curiosity

    This sourceExplains curiosity as a deprivation produced by a perceived gap in knowledge that motivates efforts to close the gap.

Verification

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