Chimpanzees and children are more curious about social interactions than individual actions

Curiosity is adaptive, enhances learning, and reduces uncertainty. Social curiosity is defined as the motivation to gain information about the actions, relationships, and psychology of others. Little is known about the developmental and evolutionary roots of such social curiosity. Here, across three comparative studies, we investigate whether chimpanzees (N = 27) and young children (4 - 6 years old, N = 94) show particular interest in social interactions among third parties. Chimpanzees and children preferred to watch videos of social interactions compared to videos of a single conspecific (Experiment 1), and young children and male chimpanzees even paid a material cost to gain social information (Experiment 2). Finally, our results show that boys become more curious about negative social interactions whereas girls become more curious about positive social interactions as they develop, while chimpanzees demonstrated no preference for negative versus positive social interactions (Experiment 3). Taken together, these findings suggest that social curiosity emerges early in human ontogeny and is shared with one of our two closest living relatives, the chimpanzees.