Xinyi Wang (Ph.D. '25)
Dissertation: “Investigating Environmental and Biological Factors that Shape our Curiosity for New Information”
What if curiosity is the key to better public health communication?
That is a question that guided 2025 Ph.D. graduate Xinyi Wang through her doctoral research at Annenberg. In an information era flooded with noise, Wang believes that fostering curiosity may be one of the most powerful, and underused, tools we have to help people learn and recall health information — because if you’re curious about something, you’re likely to remember it.
As a member of Annenberg’s Addiction, Health, & Adolescence (AHA!) Lab and the Communication Neuroscience Lab, Wang explored both the environmental and biological factors that underpin curiosity, as well as ways that health communicators could use curiosity to point people toward accurate health information. In the fall, she joined the Health Communication & Equity Lab as a postdoctoral fellow.
She is most passionate about efforts to encourage smokers to quit smoking. Curiosity, she’s found, can help smokers learn and recall facts about the behavior, even when those facts point out that it’s bad for you.
She became interested in curiosity in a health communication context while still an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “As an undergraduate research assistant, I looked at how people’s media switching experiences have an impact on their well-being, which made me realize I am very passionate about understanding the human experience related to media and communication,” Wang said. “Curiosity is an essential experience in our day-to-day knowledge consumption and media experience, yet little is known about how and why.”
Wang chose to pursue a Ph.D. at Annenberg “because of the amazing research portfolio and the significant research impact people at the School are making on the world,” she said. “I felt very inspired by the work taking place there, particularly in the realm of communication science and health communication.”
As a postdoctoral fellow at the School, Wang is continuing to research the potential for using curiosity to create more effective messaging. Most recently she led a study that covered how eductional messages about nicotine that spark a person's curiosity are better at reducing nicotine false beliefs than typical educational messages that simply state facts about nicotine.
