Investigating the validity of traditional and recent intellectual curiosity scales

Curiosity refers to the tendency to actively seek out and embrace new stimuli and challenging encounters in the environment. It is a central innate trait that lies at the intersection of cognitive ability and a general fascination with learning and stimulation in humans and other animals. In the present paper, we focused on the measurement of the arguably most studied facet of this broader trait, known as intellectual curiosity. In two quota samples from Germany (N = 539) and the UK (N = 554), we compared two prominent traditional scales of intellectual curiosity, namely, NCS-6 and ECS, and a new scale, namely, ICS, for internal consistency and factorial, construct, and predictive validity. We find that the recently proposed and culturally invariant ICS has particularly high validity in all these aspects, while also being a highly efficient measure with only six items. The EC scale also shows very good validities. The NfC scale shows the least promising results, especially regarding its internal consistency and factorial validity.