Sparking curiosity for better learning and better lives
Annenberg School for Communication doctoral graduate Xinyi Wang studies how people actively seek out and engage with new information.
2 min. read
What if curiosity is the key to better public health communication?
This is a question that has guided graduate Xinyi Wang through her doctoral research at the Annenberg School for Communication. In an information era flooded with noise, Wang believes that fostering curiosity may be one of the most powerful, and underused, tools we have to help people learn and recall health information—because if you’re curious about something, you’re likely to remember it.
Xinyi Wang is a member of Annenberg’s Addiction, Health, & Adolescence Lab and the Communication Neuroscience Lab.
(Image: Courtesy of Annenberg School for Communication)
As a member of Annenberg’s Addiction, Health, & Adolescence (AHA!) Lab as well as the Communication Neuroscience Lab, Wang explores both the environmental and biological factors that underpin curiosity, as well as ways that health communicators could use curiosity to point people toward accurate health information.
One topic she’s explored in depth is efforts to encourage smokers to quit smoking. Curiosity, she’s found, can help smokers learn and recall facts about smoking, even when those facts point out that smoking is bad for you.
“In one study, my co-authors and I quizzed participants on general and smoking-related trivia and found that trivia that sparked people’s curiosity was associated with better recall of the answers a week later, whether the trivia was smoking-related or not,” she says. “My dissertation study scaled up from this previous work and presented messages about nicotine in a curiosity-eliciting way, by putting information in the form of a question—‘What substance in tobacco cigarettes makes them more addictive?’—for example. While we didn’t test people’s memory in the longer term, we found that curiosity-eliciting nicotine knowledge was more effective in helping people form accurate beliefs about nicotine than standard messages.”
Wang’s dissertation examined curiosity in the world of communication, how we may change it, and how it is reflected in the brain. “One particularly surprising finding was that curiosity-eliciting health messages were more effective in reducing people’s false beliefs than messages with no curiosity elements,” she says. “This insight opens up new possibilities for developing health message strategies that leverage curiosity, which I am very excited to explore in future research.”
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