“This is a community where you can always expect the unexpected,” one of the group’s admins, Kushani Gunathilaka, told Bored Panda back in August, when we released our previous edition on the ‘Weird & Interesting Things You Must See’ Facebook group.
“It’s never boring and always exciting. <...> You laugh, you enjoy, you feel, you relate and you even learn things here. All of this makes the community an enjoyable space for me and surely for the rest of the members,” the admin said back when the group had around 87k members. Now, just roughly half a year later, it already boasts over 247k members.
Thousands of people joining the group in a matter of months shows that people are clearly drawn to all that is weird and interesting. But why is that?
We turned to Professor of Psychology at Stetson University, Dr. Christopher J. Ferguson, looking for some sort of an explanation, and he noted that in a general sense, we've likely evolved to pay more attention to unusual things that are outside the range of normal activity.
“Strange things could indicate danger or opportunities, so we pay a bit more attention to those. They also attract our curiosity as we try to make sense of the unexpected,” he said.
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“We've evolved to be a curious species and trying to make sense of our environment has been good for us,” Dr. Ferguson continued. “This is a generally focused trait which is probably what has made it so adaptive, and how our species has become so adaptive over so much of the planet despite different environments.”
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Talking to Bored Panda about how, if at all, people can benefit from positive, funny, and interesting—even if somewhat weird—content online, Prof. Ferguson said that first and foremost, such content can be mentally stimulating.
“Further discussing unusual phenomena can be a social activity reinforcing social bonds,” he added. “Humor, of course, is valuable in lifting negative moods and, again, as a social activity.”
In the expert’s opinion, what makes online groups so popular nowadays is the ease that they provide when it comes to connecting with like-minded people. “It tends to be much easier to meet others with similar interests online, particularly if those interests aren't very mainstream (like bowling, for instance, might have been decades ago). It allows us to cater to niche interests a lot more easily, though it also probably pulls away from sucking it up and doing shared activities that are more common in the recent past,” Dr. Ferguson said.
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Talking to Bored Panda back in August, the admins of the group shared that they always want to present their followers with something new; something that might make them go “Huh, I've never seen this before!”. Bearing in mind that we are curious beings, as Prof. Ferguson pointed out, their tactic seems to be working. And we’re here for it!
For more weird and interesting content to awaken your curiosity, browse Bored Panda’s category dedicated to all sorts of curiosities here. Happy scrolling!