“I Want to Know the Answer! Give Me Fish ’n’ Chips!”: The Impact of Curiosity on Indulgent Choice

Abstract This research examines how incidentally induced consumer curiosity influences subsequent indulgent decisions. Prior research has primarily focused on the effect of curiosity on information seeking in the present domain. The current research goes further to propose that the curiosity effect can spill over to prompt consumers to prefer indulgent options in other, unrelated domains (e.g., food, money). This situation is likely to occur because curiosity motivates individuals to seek the missing information as the specific information reward in the current domain. Such desire to obtain the information reward primes a reward-seeking goal, which in turn leads to increased preferences for indulgent options in subsequent, unrelated domains. Furthermore, the impact of curiosity on indulgent options possesses goal-priming properties as identified by the literature. That is, the effect should (1) persist after a time delay, and (2) diminish when the reward-seeking goal is satiated by the obtainment of a reward before the indulgent task. We conduct a series of studies to provide support for our hypotheses. This research contributes to both curiosity and indulgence decision literature and offers important practical implications.