Although there is a large body of research assessing whether exposure to narratives boosts social cognition immediately afterward, not much research has investigated the underlying mechanism of this putative effect. This experiment investigates the possibility that reading a narrative increases social curiosity directly afterward, which might explain the short-term boosts in social cognition reported by some others. We developed a novel measure of state social curiosity and collected data from participants (N = 222) who were randomly assigned to read an excerpt of narrative fiction or expository nonfiction. Contrary to our expectations, we found that those who read a narrative exhibited less social curiosity afterward than those who read an expository text. This result was not moderated by trait social curiosity. An exploratory analysis uncovered that the degree to which texts present readers with social targets predicted less social curiosity. Our experiment demonstrates that reading narratives, or possibly texts with social content in general, may engage and fatigue social-cognitive abilities, causing a temporary decrease in social curiosity. Such texts might also temporarily satisfy the need for social connection, temporarily reducing social curiosity. Both accounts are in line with theories describing how narratives result in better social cognition over the long term.

尽管有大量研究评估接触叙事是否会立即增强社会认知，但很少有研究调查这种假定效果的潜在机制。该实验研究了阅读叙述后立即增加社交好奇心的可能性，这可能解释了其他一些人报告的社会认知的短期提升。我们开发了一种衡量国家社会好奇心的新颖方法，并收集了参与者（N  = 222）的数据，这些参与者被随机分配阅读叙事小说或说明性非小说的摘录。与我们的预期相反，我们发现那些阅读叙述性文本的人随后表现出的社会好奇心比那些阅读说明性文本的人要少。这一结果不受社会好奇心特质的影响。一项探索性分析发现，文本向读者呈现社会目标的程度预示着社会好奇心的降低。我们的实验表明，阅读叙述性内容，或者可能包含一般社交内容的文本，可能会吸引和疲劳社交认知能力，导致社交好奇心暂时下降。此类文本也可能暂时满足社交联系的需要，暂时降低社交好奇心。这两种说法都符合描述叙事如何在长期内带来更好的社会认知的理论。