Metrics of social curiosity: The WhatsApp case

Abstract

A number of recent studies have explicitly introduced curiosity models into the analysis of online information consumption, most notably in the design of recommendation systems. However, most prior efforts have neglected the role of social influence as a component of the curiosity stimulation process, which has been referred to as social curiosity. In this paper, we propose a number of metrics to quantify social curiosity applying them to WhatsApp, a widely used communication platform. We show that our metrics capture aspects that are complementary to other variables priorly related to curiosity stimulation and use them to offer a broad characterization of user curiosity as a driving force behind communication in WhatsApp.