Recognizing versus valuing curiosity: Cross-country similarities and differences in parental judgments of early curious behaviors

Cross-cultural research has examined whether parents differ in how they value curiosity as a developmental characteristic, but it remains unclear whether they understand the concept in the same way. Because early curiosity must be inferred from behavior, concrete behavioral judgments offer a direct test of this question. Parents in Germany, China, and Japan were randomly assigned to judge age-appropriate behaviors from a published infant-toddler or early-childhood curiosity measure, rating each either as an expression of curiosity or as socially desirable. The 689 parents (142 German, 425 Chinese, and 122 Japanese; ethnicity not explicitly collected) reported on children aged 5 to 71 months (344 girls, 345 boys) between July 2025 and March 2026. Candidate curiosity items clearly outperformed non-curiosity fillers in every country (differences of 1.19 to 2.84 points on a 7-point scale), and behavior orderings were strongly similar across countries (Spearman ρ = .67 to .88). Ratings were near-identical for individual items such as poking and probing, with country differences in curiosity attribution occurring much less compared to desirability differences (for 4 versus 19 items). These findings suggest that cultures may differ less in what curiosity looks like than in which behavioral expressions of curiosity are welcomed and reinforced.