People Watching

Our social voyeurism may have deep evolutionary roots

- —Clarissa Brincat

THE HUMAN FASCINATION with watching others—whether through reality TV, Instagram stories or overheard drama—is often dismissed as nosiness. But new research suggests this impulse may be a social survival tool dating back millions of years.

To explore the origins of social curiosity, Laura Lewis, a comparative and developmental psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her colleagues studied how human children between four and six years old from San Francisco’s Bay Area and adult chimpanzees responded to certain videos showing members of their respective species. The results, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, show that both groups preferred watching social interactions over scenes involving solitary individuals—even forgoing small rewards to see the former.