“People have two types of evaluation systems; one’s based on curiosity, another is based on pure enjoyment. This evaluation system based on curiosity is different from how people evaluate normal things.” ~ XuanJun Gong, PhD

XuanJun Gong is interested in media selection, computational modeling, communication networks, and information diffusion. He’s looked at how we choose media to manage our moods, how the sequence of our choices matters, and what draws us to that next book.

All of this is one version or another of the old curiosity conundrum: explore or exploit?

Do we seek novelty or leverage what we already know? Why? Does it get us what we want? 

How do we even know….?

We talked about curiosity in decision making; how different our curiosity styles can be (cats’ too!); “human mobility” and the sequence of our previous actions’ impact on predicting our future choices; curiosity’s disruption of those prediction models; and preprints and the inevitable appeal of novel research. Did you know people who are highly curious have atypical eye tracking patterns?

Curiosity does disrupt the predictability of people who are highly curious. It’s less likely we’ll make a good prediction.

Listen to Choose to Be Curious #275: Pick A Book, Any Book: Curiosity & Media Choices, with XuanJun Gong

Xuanjun (Jason) Gong, PhD is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University. His research focus is on media selection, computational modeling, communication networks, and information diffusion. Here’s the preprint that caught my eye.

Learn a little more about the 1957 classic film 12 Angry Men and the import of preprint papers.

Did this topic catch your eye as well? You might enjoy these C2BC Classics: Solutions Journalism: An Exercise in Curiosity, with Marie Von Hafften; Network Systems: Connecting the Dots, with Dani Bassett; and Images of Curiosity: Visual & Domain-Specific, with Emily Peterson.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Zig Zag Heart” by Nursery, via Blue Dot Sessions.

You can subscribe to Choose to Be Curious on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.