PSC

Perceived System Curiosity Scale

The PSC is a 3-factor, 12-item scientific scale that allows to measure how curious a system is perceived by the user accross the three factors perceived explorative curiosity, perceived investigative curiosity, and percevied social curiosity. The PSC scale is freely available under the Creative Commons BY license. Please refer to our publication, which describes the development and validation of PSC. The PSC scale was published at the ACM 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Scale Items

Perceived Explorative Curiosity (PSCE)
PSC1 The system enjoys novel experiences.
PSC2 The system is driven towards novel sensations.
PSC3 The system is interested in interacting with novel objects.
PSC4 The system is excited by unpredictable tasks.
PSC5 The system likes to find out how things work.
Perceived Investigative Curiosity (PSCI)
PSC6 The system invests substantial time to collect new knowledge.
PSC7 The system likes to investigate.
PSC8 The system is inquisitive.
Perceived Social Curiosity (PSCS)
PSC9 The system likes finding out why others behave the way they do.
PSC10 The system wants to know what others are doing.
PSC11 The system likes listening to others' conversations.
PSC12 The system is interested in learning more about people.

Application & Scoring

Use 101-point Visual Analog Sliders (VAS) ranging from 0 to 100, with the anchors strongly disagree (0) and strongly agree (100).
Randomize the order of the items.
Each subscale can be used independently, but the PSC value can only be calculated when all three are used.
Use the following formulas for scoring:

PSCE = (PSC1 + PSC2 + PSC3 + PSC4 + PSC5) / 5
PSCI = (PSC6 + PSC7 + PSC8) / 3
PSCS = (PSC9 + PSC10 + PSC11 + PSC12) / 4
PSC = (PSCE + PSCI + PSCS) / 3

Publication

Please cite the following publication when you use PSC.


Jan Leusmann and Steeven Villa and Burak Berberoglu and Chao Wang and Sven Mayer. 2025. Developing and Validating the Perceived System Curiosity Scale (PSC): Measuring Users' Perceived Curiosity of Systems. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Japan) (CHI '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713087

Paper DOI

BibTeX

@inproceedings{leusmann2025developing, title = {Developing and Validating the Perceived System Curiosity Scale (PSC): Measuring Users' Perceived Curiosity of Systems}, author = {Jan Leusmann and Steeven Villa and Burak Berberoglu and Chao Wang and Sven Mayer}, doi = {10.1145/3706598.3713087}, isbn = {979-8-4007-1394-1/25/04}, year = {2025}, date = {2025-04-26}, urldate = {2025-04-26}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {Japan}, series = {CHI '25}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {inproceedings}

Abstract

Like humans, today's systems, such as robots and voice assistants, can express curiosity to learn and engage with their surroundings. While curiosity is a well-established human trait that enhances social connections and drives learning, no existing scales assess the perceived curiosity of systems. Thus, we introduce the Perceived System Curiosity (PSC) scale to determine how users perceive curious systems. We followed a standardized process of developing and validating scales, resulting in a validated 12-item scale with 3 individual sub-scales measuring explorative, investigative, and social dimensions of system curiosity. In total, we generated 831 items based on literature and recruited 414 participants for item selection and 320 additional participants for scale validation. Our results show that the PSC scale has inter-item reliability and convergent and construct validity. Thus, this scale provides an instrument to explore how perceived curiosity influences interactions with technical systems systematically.