Hands up if you’re obsessed with reality TV.

Go on. No judgement here.

I’ve been watching Survivor  since I was six years old Even if you don’t spend your  weekends binge watching Love Island, you’ve probably done a bit of  people-watching in a cafe or on the bus. This is more than just a pastime. It’s a phenomenon called social curiosity and, turns out, we’re not the only ones who are nosey  about what’s going on in other’s lives.

There’s evidence to support  the idea that people-watching is older than people – as in, some of our closest relatives do it too. And that may help us understand how human  social behavior evolved in the first place. [INTRO] Humans are social animals. And not just in a social media kind of way.

The very way we live, divide  up work, care for each other, and share knowledge all relies on us being social. But for all this to function, we need to understand the rules  of this complex social system, and change our behaviour when the system changes. Like, it’s perfectly acceptable to  be shouting at an AFC Wimbledon game, but not so much in a library.

Or you might travel to a different country and notice the norms there are different  to what you’re used to at home. So what better way to learn those social rules than by watching what other people are doing? Paying attention to how others behave allows us to gather a bunch of information.

Yes, about the rules of the group, but also about who’s a good  friend or a future partner; as well as who might be a threat  and worth staying away from. Scoping out how others are  acting even has the added benefit that maybe we’ll see them doing  something clever that we can copy, or something not so smart that we can avoid. That’s social curiosity in a nutshell.

But for a behavior that’s so widespread, we don’t understand it as well as you might think. Like whether social animals people-watch too. There’s lots of evidence  that all kinds of primates— from ringtail lemurs, macaques and capuchins, to orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees— are curious creatures.

But most, if not all, of the  evidence researchers have gathered has to do with primates seeking out  information about the physical environment. Like, say, opening a tube to see if  there’s food or something hidden inside. Scientists also know that human infants are naturally curious and will  go explore new areas or objects.

That curiosity is key to helping  them learn about how the world works. Which, any parent who’s tried  to child proof their home could have told you for free! But what researchers don’t know much about is whether young humans and other  primates are socially curious too.

It makes sense that they might be, since human adults are, and that curiosity has to come from somewhere. Whether it grew on the evolutionary  tree, or happens as we mature. One of the first studies to  see whether other primates might be curious about their friends was in 2022, looking at rhesus macaques.

Quick note though: This study hasn’t been through  the peer review process, and we couldn’t figure out exactly why not, but it’s only available on a preprint server. In this study, researchers trained monkeys  to look at a screen and tap a button if they wanted to know about the size  of a juice reward that was coming up. And wouldn’t you know, they did.

Then the scenario changed. Now, monkeys could tap the button if they wanted to know about  how a friend monkey was feeling. In this scenario, the monkeys would  see a picture of another monkey that either looked threatening or neutral.

And they’d still get a juice reward afterwards, although it was always the same amount. In that scenario, the macaques  wanted to know what the face would be almost all the time. There was also a scenario where the monkeys didn’t get any information beforehand  about what the face would be like.

In those cases, they looked at the  face for longer when it did appear, which made the researchers think that the animals were trying to take in all  of the social information. Basically, the macaques liked  getting social information as much as other kinds of information. And there’s more we’ll get into, but  first, all science needs funding, so here’s a quick break.

If you made it this far into a SciShow video, you’re probably the kind of  person who loves engaging with new ideas and learning  outside of a classroom. And that’s what makes Brilliant so great too. Brilliant can show you how to code in Python, with their Thinking in Python course.

It’s a great course if you're  a beginner to programming, or if you just want a refresher of core concepts. After all, Brilliant is made  for everyone from age 10 to 110. To learn for free on Brilliant for a full 30 days, go to brilliant.org/scishow,  scan the QR code onscreen, or click on the link in the description.

They’re also giving you unlimited daily access to everything on Brilliant with 20%  off an annual Premium subscription. Thank you to Brilliant for  supporting this SciShow video. In a 2025 paper, scientists  created a series of experiments to see how human children between four and six years old, as well as adult chimps,  might show social curiosity.

The researchers wanted to include kids here because, they argue, the main driver for a child’s  curiosity is to gather information, just like the chimps. The experiments used these  things called curiosity boxes: two boxes, each with a  tablet inside where the chimp or child could choose a video to watch. In the first experiment, the subjects could watch members of  their own species either by themselves, or behaving in a group.

Researchers saw that both children and the apes were more interested in watching the group videos. This confirmed for the researchers  that both were socially curious. Good start!

But it might also be that chimps and children want to get as much information as possible, and a video with multiple actors interacting will have more information  than a video with just one. So, in a second experiment, subjects could either watch a  video of a social interaction or get a reward—a tasty jackfruit seed  for the chimps or a shiny marble for kids. And both the kids and chimps  spent more time with the video box than the reward box.

Basically, they were willing to pay a cost, by giving up the reward, to  see a social interaction. In particular, it was the  younger children and male chimps that were more interested in the videos. Maybe, the researchers thought, because social information is even  more important for those groups, or even more rewarding.

But there were a few complicating factors. Maybe the video box was just more enticing. After all, they could hear the  sounds coming from the box.

Male chimps might be super drawn to those sounds, since they tend to start most conflicts and are likely tuned to the sound of fighting. And, again, if you know kids, you’ll know how drawn they can be to a screen. The researchers didn’t say  anything specifically about this, but they did say that children  might be “more familiar” with them.

Finally, the researchers wanted to know what kind of social information chimps  and children might be curious about. In this third experiment, the curiosity boxes either had a  video of a negative interaction, like fighting or a child getting yelled at, or a positive social interaction, like playing or grooming. The team replaced the original  audio with ambient forest sounds so that no one would come  running at the sound of conflict.

Chimps explored both videos for  about the same amount of time. Meanwhile, older human boys  preferred the negative interactions while girls preferred the positive ones.   The researchers partly chalked  this up to how boys and girls have historically been socialized, saying that boys might be pushed to be part of competitive and physical conflicts. Which, you know, might change as our way of  socializing our kids change too.

Now, there are limitations to this one study. Watching videos is not a very natural scenario, even for young kids. So it might be a good idea to do similar  experiments watching live interactions too.

But at very least, this evidence shows us that we’re not alone in people-watching. It’s likely that our ultra-social  tendencies have been evolving for a very long time, and show up in our closest living relatives. We soak in that information, and we gain evolutionary  benefits from living in a group.

Which probably means our primate ancestor, living some 5 to 8 million years ago, was doing the ancient equivalent  of watching reality TV. And that helped make us the  social creatures we are today. So it’s totally fine if you wanna binge watch the season 1 of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, we’ve been doing it forever anyway. [ OUTRO ]