The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation

Abstract The genesis of this paper was a gripe. A few years before writing it I had become interested in the phenomenon of curiosity. I read all the literature on curiosity that I could get my hands on, came up with my own “information gap” theory, and ran a series of studies to test the theory. I then submitted the resulting paper for publication, with disastrous results. Curiosity as a topic of study was ‘off the map’ in psychology at that point, and had been for decades, so the editor must have had trouble identifying appropriate reviewers. He must have decided that ‘intrinsic motivation’ was the closest topic to curiosity that people were actively researching. At least that was my inference, based on a series of reviews, the main gist of which seemed to be that my theory was crap, that the right theory was based on the concept of intrinsic motivation, and that I obviously didn’t know anything about the topic of curiosity.