Why Did Curiosity Kill the Cat?
The “Pandora effect” explains why we act on curiosity even when we know a bad outcome is likely
--
One of the more legendary (at least online) bits of TV comedy of the past decade comes from an episode of Family Guy. Peter and Lois have been lured to a timeshare sales pitch by the offer of a free boat. When the salesman finally appears, Peter demands his boat. The salesman says, “You have a choice. You can have the boat … or the mystery box,” holding up a shoe box with question marks all over it.
“Are you crazy? We’ll take the boat,” Lois sensibly says. But Peter holds up his hand: “Not so fast, Lois. A boat’s a boat. But a mystery box could be anything! It could even be a boat!” He takes the box, and instead of the boat of his dreams, he gets two tickets to a comedy club.
Now, Peter is a dope, but the story is about something interesting — not just the allure of possibility, but the power of simple curiosity. Once the box is presented, the desire to know what’s inside it is hard to resist. Obviously, it’s not that hard to resist, and in real life we’d all take the boat. But a recent paper by business-school professors Christopher Hsee and Bowen Ruan suggests that curiosity is, in fact, an incredibly powerful impulse, one that’s often so strong that people will act on it even when they know that doing so is likely to yield bad outcomes. It’s what Hsee and Ruan call the Pandora Effect.
They illustrate this with a series of simple but memorable experiments. The first involved prank pens that could deliver painless but electric shocks if you clicked them. Participants were brought in under the pretense of doing a different study, and while they were supposedly waiting for that study to happen, they were seated at a desk with 10 pens in front of them. Half of the participants got 5 pens with red labels (meaning they could shock) and 5 pens with green labels (meaning they just clicked). The other half of the participants got 10 pens with yellow labels (meaning they might shock or might not). were labeled red, half green, and half yellow. They were told they could click the pens while they were waiting.
Now, if people clicked at random, out of boredom, you would expect the people in each group to click as many pens…
