Likes, Swipes and Clickbait
How our Attention is Hijacked by ‘Shallow Curiosity’
‘Curiosity has much in common with the sex drive, which is also a powerful motivator, highly stimulus bound, and associated with impulsive behaviour and disappointment.’
George Loewenstein, The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation
Some inventions have saved humanity countless centuries’ worth of work. The washing machine, dishwasher. Cranes, trucks, diggers. Maybe, someday, we’ll be able to put AI into that category.
Social media is another story, with its endless news feeds and clickbait.
How much time have these inventions cost humanity?
They thrive by making us think we might be missing out. By making us think we have to pay attention, by making us curious.
Yet understanding how our curiosity works – particularly the difference between deep and shallow curiosity – can help us regain control over our attention.
Swipe right
Often, curiosity starts with a question.
How can we get people to use Tinder when they’re on the move and only have one hand to spare?
Tinder co-founder Jonathan Badeen was thinking about this problem and getting nowhere.1 Then one morning he woke up with the idea.
Imagine you have a stack of cards. Each one has a face on it and your job is to sort them into a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ pile.
A simple idea that drove Tinder’s growth, giving swiping a whole new meaning. It became an activity.
It wasn’t even the swiping as much as the excitement – what next? Who else might be lurking around the corner: A lonely supermodel? A sexy billionaire? Or even The One?
And the thought that while you’re swiping through photos of other people, millions of others are doing the same. Someone else is probably looking at your picture. Do they swipe left or right? When are you going to get a match? It’s the gamification of dating: when are you going to hit the jackpot?
The psychology of gambling (in 100 words)
Tinder’s creators took inspiration from psychology. In particular, the work of B.F. Skinner.
Skinner put pigeons in boxes. When a pigeon hit a button with its beak, food fell out. It carried on clicking.
It carried on clicking, in fact, even when no food came out.
Skinner had created a habit.
Want to make the habit even stronger? Don’t give the pigeon food each time it clicks the button. Instead, give it food every other time. Or every fifth time. Or, even better, after a random number of hits.
This variable reward schedule is the principle behind gambling machines like the one-armed bandit. You know the reward might come; you just don’t know when.
Bored yet?
Curiosity is a form of mental engagement. You can think about something – filling the washing machine, emptying the dishwasher – without being curious. But you can’t be curious without thinking about something. What we think about, and the way we think about it, determines the kind of curiosity we experience.
There are two types of curiosity, pioneering curiosity researcher Daniel Berlyne claimed – specific and diversive curiosity.2 If you’re trying to figure out a crossword puzzle, how an engine works or the location of El Dorado, that’s specific curiosity. It has a single target.
Diversive curiosity is a vaguer state. It’s the relief of boredom. You’re scrolling on your phone or flicking through TV channels waiting for something to grab your attention.
But it’s possible to move from one to the other.
Think of the toddler wandering around, searching for something exciting. They spot your jewellery box and think they’ve hit the jackpot.
This, in some ways, is what much of the internet aspires to – taking us out of that aimless state and giving us something we can get our teeth into. Something that really hooks us.
Social media thrives on engagement. It’s one of the key metrics of success and growth. The more people use your app, the more advertising revenue you can take.
If you want to keep eyeballs on an ad, curiosity is a surefire way of ensuring engagement. But this often leads to a race to the bottom. The focus is on grabbing attention rather than sustaining it, which leads to hyperbolic headlines and flashing banners.
There are so many apps and websites competing for our attention that it’s easy to become passive. We begin depending on their stimulation for our entertainment. We forget what it’s like to grapple with a problem, how to formulate questions and find reliable answers.
Without our computers or phones, we become bored. And, as psychology has shown, it isn’t all that difficult to hook the attention of people who are bored.
Shocking experiments
People would rather give themselves electric shocks than be left alone with their own thoughts.
In one experiment, psychologists left participants alone in a room. Everyone had previously said they would pay to avoid an electric shock, but within fifteen minutes, two thirds of men and a quarter of women had pushed the button to give themselves a shock. 3
Why?
Diversive curiosity. It turns out anything is better than boredom, even an electric shock.
Sit by yourself with only a button in front of you and you start to wonder what the shock might feel like. How strong it might be.
In another series of experiments, Christopher K. Hsee and Bowen Ruan investigated exactly this idea.4
Again, participants were left waiting in a room, ostensibly between other tasks. This time, they had a box of pens in front of them. All the pens had a sticker on them. For some participants, the colour of the sticker told them whether or not they’d get a painful 60V shock. Other participants didn’t know which pens would shock them.
On average, the participants who didn’t know which pens would shock them clicked twice as many pens. Even more strangely, in the other group, participants clicked more of the pens they knew would shock them than the pens that wouldn’t.
In another test, participants had all three types of pens – ones that were certain to shock them, ones that definitely wouldn’t and ones they didn’t know about. Again, participants clicked more than twice as many of the uncertain pens than either the ones that would definitely shock them or definitely not shock them.
Participants also chose to listen to an uncertain sound, which could be nails down a chalkboard, over the guarantee of a pleasant tune. Their feelings suffered as a result. The more they chose the uncertain sound, the worse they claimed to feel as time went on.
Even when we know the outcome could be harmful or painful, our curiosity often drives us to choose the uncertain option.
Curiosity’s dark side
We are told that curiosity is a good thing. In the last week alone, I’ve seen curiosity used to sell newspaper subscriptions, university courses and the Church of England.
Celebrities and scientists have praised curiosity. Steve Jobs put his ability to innovate down to his ceaseless curiosity. Psychologist Brené Brown has described curiosity as a ‘superpower’.
Sometimes, though, your own curiosity can get the better of you.
In 2017, a group of researchers asked 600 US psychology undergrads to complete an online personality assessment.5
The real test, though, was yet to come.
Two weeks later, some of the students got an email from a suspicious source. Those who clicked were more likely to be risk takers who were prone to boredom and lacked focus.
The decisive factor, though, was how curious they were. Those high in curiosity needed to know their results, regardless of how dubious the source of the email was.
Studies have found that curious people are more likely to party than to study, to engage in risky behaviour and to experiment with drugs – or, at least, to use curiosity as an excuse for trying drugs.6
Never stray from the path
When we’re browsing, we’re like the character in a fairytale, staring up at the trees as we wander while the wolf stalks us.
Our curiosity makes us oblivious to the dangers lurking around us.
We’ve been told to stay on the path – the safe websites, the ones with that little padlock at the top. But our curiosity makes us stray.
We drop breadcrumbs to show us the way back but advertisers and ‘information merchants’ like the social media giants are following behind, pecking them up as they go.
The more we click, the more we allow online lurkers to learn about us. The tech giants are just as curious as we are. They want to know about our gender identity, our age, our income, and our deepest wishes.
It’s not so much that they want to blackmail us – that would be too much effort. They exploit our desires. Why try and sell a top-of-the-line robotic lawnmower to a tech worker who lives in an apartment building when you could sell her the latest phone contract or coffee machine?
And they’re usually our most benign stalkers.
Because there are potential blackmailers are lurking out there. People who seem like desperate students or lovelorn widows. But who knows what they are really after.
Young people (and not so young people) are also lured towards extremist positions by peddlers of conspiracy theories. Information and mis-information – curiosity doesn’t always distinguish.
At least, one form of curiosity doesn’t.
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Clickbait headlines promise to change your life and instead end up delivering a lifetime’s supply of cookies and pop-up ads.
Sometimes it can feel like the entire internet is screaming for us to look, like a class of eager toddlers who’ve just finished their finger paintings.
In 1994, the psychologist George Loewenstein wrote an academic paper summarising the research on curiosity to date.7
Curiosity, he claimed, has four defining features:
It is short lived
It makes us impulsive
It creates an intensity within us
We’re left disappointed after our curiosity has been sated
We will call these the Loewenstein Criteria.
These four features certainly apply to some examples of curiosity – the curiosity that makes us click on a dodgy link in a phishing email or follow a headline promising unbelievable rates of return on our investments.
Lots of the research Loewenstein drew on was designed to be carried out in the laboratory – easily controlled and measured, with repetitive questions and a short timescale.
Often, this is not a good way of modelling real-life curiosity.
Think about Sir Isaac Newton’s work in mathematics and physics, Frida Kahlo’s expressions of her experiences or, indeed, Loewenstein’s own, decades-long research into curiosity.
This work is long-lived, requires careful, deliberate thought and the intensity peaks and dissipates across the days and years. The answers, when they come, can be extremely satisfying, and lead to yet more questions.
These are all examples of deep curiosity. Curiosity that gets under your skin. That helps you to grow. That, occasionally, changes the world.
Loewenstein’s Criteria can help us to distinguish good from bad. If it ticks the four boxes above, it’s shallow curiosity.
Deep Curiosity
Shallow curiosity tends to be associated with a stimulus.
It’s triggered by a tantalising headline or a few whispered words.
Or through the senses – the smell of a street food stall, the intro to a song or a face across the room.
Deep curiosity – the sort that enriches our lives and helps us to grow – remains even when the stimulus fades away.
It’s the feeling we get when we’re falling in love. When we think about the object of our affection, even when they’re miles from us, and wonder what they’re doing. What they’re thinking about.
It’s the curiosity that wakes us up at midnight with an insight that might become a breakthrough on a project.
It’s the curiosity that has driven progress in the sciences and the arts and transformed the world through technological innovation.
Deep curiosity is always there, waiting. We just need to take a moment away from all those screaming headlines, which promise so much and deliver so little, to find it.
Sources
BBC Three. (2025). Dating Apps: The Inside Story. BBC iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002n1t3/dating-apps-the-inside-story
Berlyne, D. E. (1966). Curiosity and exploration. Science, 153(3731), 25–33
Wilson, T. D., Reinhard, D. A., Westgate, E. C., Gilbert, D. T., Ellerbeck, N., Hahn, C., Brown, C. L., & Shaked, A. (2014). Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind. Science, 345(6192), 75–77
Hsee, C. K., & Ruan, B. (2016). The Pandora effect: The power and peril of curiosity. Psychological Science, 27(5), 659–666
Moody, G. D., Galletta, D. F., & Dunn, B. K. (2017). Which phish get caught? An exploratory study of individuals’ susceptibility to phishing. European Journal of Information Systems, 26(6), 564–584
Arneklev, B. J. (2023). Self-control and curiosity: Has curiosity been an overlooked concept in the crime/deviance decision-making process? Deviant Behavior, 44(8), 1194–1218
Rácz, J. (2008). The role of the curiosity in interviews with drug users. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 9(2), Art. 16
Loewenstein, G. (1994). The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 75–98
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