Rolf Degen summarizes: People willingly accept inconveniences in order to satisfy their curiosity, even if the sought for information is unpleasant or will put them in a bad mood

The seductive lure of curiosity: information as a motivationally salient reward. Lily Fitz Gibbon, Johnny King LLau, Kou Murayama. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 35, October 2020, Pages 21-27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.05.014

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1308270412439093249

Highlights

• Curiosity is a powerful motivator of information-seeking behavior.

• People risk negative experiences to satisfy curiosity.

• Empirical evidence reveals parallels between information and extrinsic rewards.

• Incentive salience may provide motivation for information beyond its expected value.

Abstract: Humans are known to seek non-instrumental information, sometimes expending considerable effort or taking risks to receive it, for example, ‘curiosity killed the cat’. This suggests that information is highly motivationally salient. In the current article, we first review recent empirical studies that demonstrated the strong motivational lure of curiosity – people will pay and risk electric shocks for non-instrumental information; and request information that has negative emotional consequences. Then we suggest that this seductive lure of curiosity may reflect a motivational mechanism that has been discussed in the literature of reward learning: incentive salience. We present behavioral and neuroscientific evidence in support of this idea and propose two areas requiring further investigation – how incentive salience for information is instigated; and individual differences in motivational vigor.