RENNERSOCIAL CU IOSITY IN ADULTS Curiosity About People: The Development of a Social Curiosity Measure in Adults

Curiosity refers to the desire for acquiring new information. The aim of this study was to de-velop a questionnaire to assess social curiosity, that is, interest in how other people think, feel, and behave. The questionnaire was administered to 312 participants. Factor analyses of the 10-item Social Curiosity Scale (SCS) yielded 2 factors: General Social Curiosity and Covert So-cial Curiosity. Evidence of convergent validity was provided by moderately high correlations of the SCS with other measures of curiosity and self-perceived curiosity, whereas discriminant va-lidity was demonstrated by low correlations of the SCS with other personality traits, such as neuroticism and agreeableness. Of interest, social interaction anxiety was observed to facilitate covert social curiosity while inhibiting general social curiosity. Curiosity has been conceptualized as desire for new informa-tion and knowledge (e.g., Berlyne, 1954; Kashdan, Rose, &amp